Electronic Book Review - mcluhanhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/mcluhan
enThe Domestic as Virtual Reality: Reflections on NetArt and Postfeminismhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/amplified
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jess Loseby</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>My introduction to <em><strong>net.art</strong></em> began in 2001, past its “heroic era.” Indeed, by the time I felt confident enough to upload my tentative photomontaged sound-bytes, New Media writers had already begun to say that the network avant-garde was limping, if not mortally wounded. At that time I was working off a laptop based on my kitchen table from which I could operate a limited artistic practice whilst chasing my youngest child around the house. Thus, the kitchen table became my portal to digitality, not only the hub of my digital practice (as it is the hub of my domesticity), but the centre of my desire to develop my thematics of the cyber-chick - sitting somewhere between the microwave and the modem in the isolation of the domestic/digital world, questioning what the avant-garde might be and what my role might be in it, just as I was throwing myself into what at that time appeared to be its last days.</p>
<p>I found myself sitting, not merely at the kitchen table, but surrounded by the accoutrements of the domestic world. In the perennially hierarchically structured social system, the domestic is perceived as insignificant in comparison not only to the world of work (for no work is really done at home, is it?), but also to the world of “male” tools. Screwdrivers are tools, and drills really are, but aren’t the implements of the kitchen tools, too? These wooden spoons, knives, and peelers? In fact, many of them are technological: the coffee maker that grinds its own beans and makes its own coffee, hours after programmed to do so; the digital food processor that must be set up “just so” to prevent loss of fingers; the microwave, the dishwasher… What has happened, I asked myself, to make a hammer bear a masculine and therefore superior connotation where a wooden spoon, equally essential, has a distinctively feminine aspect (except within the hands of a male chef, of course)? Yet even in the kitchen a male hierarchical system prevails, one that places the microwave over the spoon, the processor over the knife. The degree of development through technological innovation determines the ranking of an object within the domestic sphere. A bachelor kitchen may be thoughtfully littered with smart, chrome gadgets - but ask if he owns a wooden spoon.</p>
<p>The irony of the domestic and of technology and women is three-fold: first off, the more that technology has entered the domestic world, the more domestic work that women have found foisted upon them. Studies have estimated that with the advent of washing machines and vacuum cleaners, etc., time spent on female domestic work has stayed the same or actually increased so that domestic technology has in reality made a woman’s day longer and more difficult. <cite id="note_1" class="note">Michale Bittman, James Mahmud Rice, and Judy Wajcman, in “Appliance and their impact: The ownership of domestic technology and time spent on household work,” say that “owning domestic technology rarely reduces household work. In some cases owning appliances increased the time spent of the relevant task” (<span class="journaltitle">The British Journal of Sociology</span> 55.3 (2004): 401-23).</cite> Secondly, while even technology-driven domestic tools are not considered technological, women actually use computers more than men. In fact, women constitute 57 percent of all computer users so that even though computers have a high-tech and male connotation, most users are female <cite id="note_2" class="note">Bruce A. Weinberg, in “Computer use and the demand for female workers,” argues that “not only are women substantially more likely than men to use computers, but the adoption of computers has likely been associated with changes in the nature and conditions of work that favor women.” <span class="journaltitle">Industrial and Labor Relations Review</span> 53.2 (January 2000); Business Source Premier.</cite> Also, interestingly, as Cornford and Habib suggest, “Home computers are often considered as `domestic technology’ or part of the `domestic media ensemble’ as if those were simple and straightforward concepts.” Merely placing a computer within the domestic sphere strips it of its technological social advantage, but often ignores the complexity of that very internal private space, for that is what we are talking about here, isn’t it? The higher the social standing of the male and the technological, the lower one of the female and the domestic?</p>
<p>The domestic world is complicated by the human application of value onto its tools. Items become rife with significance regardless of their technological standing. Objects themselves are infused with unique meaning by their users. An old chipped cup might be the last of a treasured wedding set or a remnant of childhood. A brand new juicer might be the gift of a lover. Patterns of significance developed within this environment are individual to the home, to the domestic context.</p>
<p>Significance also imbues the domestic tool by means of the social and the material. Branding becomes an issue (Is that a Viking stove? A Subzero refrigerator?) and a marker of social standing. Machines that separate the body from direct contact with the food carry higher social place as well, so that a grater is not as esteemed as an automated slicer/chopper/shredder.</p>
<p>In addition to this collaboration between body and domestic, technology engenders a secret rhythm and interchange: the endless cycle of consumption and elimination, the formation of bacteria and its ritual extermination. Repetition, routine, multiplication, and control are the thematics of this relational space. “[E]verday life,” says Van Loon, “consists of a multiplicity of rhythms. Everyday life thus entails a range of flows, each with their own `proper time’ (e.g., duration, pace, frequency). Likewise, we could argue that everyday life consists of a multiplicity of spatializations, including forms of embodiment.” <cite id="note_3" class="note">Manovich, L (2002) quoted in A. Galloway, “Intimations of everyday life,” <span class="journaltitle">Cultural Studies</span> 18.2-3 (2004): 384-408; EPSCOHost. Edwards and Grinter identify difficulties with determining and taking advantage of these inherent iterations of the domestic: “routines are subtle, complex, and ill-articulated, if they are articulated at all” (“At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges” 256-272 in G.D. Abowd, B. Brumitt, S. A. N. Shafer (Eds.) Proceedings of Ubicomp 2001. LNCS 2201. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001).</cite> The repetition of daily domestic experience serves two purposes: one is to place the body in space, to orient the self but on a domestic rather than an urban level (a la de Certeau, for instance); the other is to accrete value over time. By doing the same thing time and time again (wiping the counter, washing the dishes, folding the laundry), the value of the devoted to that task becomes an essential component in the confirmation of the value of life - the order of the private world.</p>
<p>The kitchen quietly and without panoply models a seamless new medium, one that provides an intersection between the body and technology, one that facilitates the co-immersion of the female with the high tech. The kitchen, therefore, has already created and established the type of embodied environment that New Media theorists such as Lev Manovich have predicted but failed to identify. In <em><strong>The Poetics of Augmented Space</strong></em>, Manovich dismisses the domestic as nothing more than a “physical space filled with electronic and visual information.” <cite id="note_4" class="note"><a href="http://www.manovich.net" class="outbound">http://www.manovich.net</a></cite></p>
<p>The domestic spaces in New Media could be said to be the developing “rooms” of Augmented Reality (AR) and Augmented Virtuality (AV). Although definitions still remain fluid, it may be generally understood that in AR, the space and its objects, are constructs of the imagination and fantasy of another (most usually a [male] programmer) in a similar manner to Virtual Reality (VR). In an Augmented Reality environment, a domestic object would not have its “expected” properties but would be superimposed with new, virtual properties. For example: in AR, a table might be used as a transportation device, it might transform into a doorway opening to some other level or it might have animistic or human properties. These imposed properties only exist within the Augmented Reality.</p>
<p>Augmented Virtuality (AV) is also a construct, not of fantasy or imagination, but of a simulation or a matrix-like imitation of the “real world.” AV uses “real world” objects to enhance the digital reality and the augmented objects it creates to aid the immersive experience. “The ultimate goal,” says Vallino, “is to create a system such that the user can not tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation.” <cite id="note_5" class="note">Vallino, J, “Introduction to Augmented Reality, ” 2002. From: “Augmented Reality Page” Internet: <a href="http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/introduction.html" class="outbound">http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/introduction.html</a></cite></p>
<p>Unlike the objects in the domestic kitchen space, in both the utopias of AR and AV the relational spaces between objects are made and signified by the same digital materials: any relational space is between two equals, if it exists at all. The perceived differences of organic and non-organic, animate and inanimate are illusional, differentiated only by a length or arrangement of code. When translating these arrangements, the processor sees no hierarchy between the coded cluster that will represent the microwave and that which will represent the wooden spoon. Although these digital representations can mimic cycles and flows within the domestic space, there is no differentiation between high and low technology as all objects are constructs of high technology. In the language of rhizome, hierarchical structures are neutralised because all structures are fabricated. This observation of “digital equality” can be extended in that, although it might be argued that there is an organic (human) positioning within AR or AV (via the avatar or user), what might be called secondary organic material (which might cover blood, sweat or tears) can also only exist as a digital fabrication. Extending this exploration further introduces the complications of placing emotions/feelings or even ideas of self within an AR or AV. Within a cyber-domestic aesthetic (or the kitchen model) these ingredients are treated as tangible objects, the presence or absence of which may also conceivably induce a relational space in which the cyber-domestic can operate. The presences or absences of these conditions or objects also can impose significance or neutrality onto other relational objects even without reference to their form or function (which may also affect their hierarchical positioning within the space). AR or AV is as yet unable (within the constraints of current technology) to take these objects of self, emotion, or their associations to enhance immersive environments beyond a digital catharsis or symbolically representational level. Mark Weiser (sometimes called “the father of ubiquitous computing” <cite id="note_6" class="note">“Ubiquitous Computing,” (no date) From: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center - Sandbox Server Internet: <a href="http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html" class="outbound">http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html</a></cite> ) put it in a more comprehensible way when he asserted, “virtual reality is only a map, not a territory.” <cite id="note_7" class="note">Galloway, A., “Intimations of everyday life,” Cultural Studies 18. 2-3 (2004): 384-408. Internet: <a href="http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=80APWUT7VNY4WAJ4QDA0" class="outbound">http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=80APWUT7VNY4WAJ4QDA0</a></cite></p>
<p>However, if technology can and has been assimilated into the domestic, where or what is the domesticity of cyberspace? Within the recent trend for a formalisation of net.art, it is immediately apparent that domesticity plays no part within the texts and institutionally directed net “agenda.” Dietz’s “datamined ten categories” of net.art include “net.art, storytelling, socio-cultural, biographical, tools, performance, analog-hybrid, interactive art, interfaces + artificers.” <cite id="note_8" class="note">Dietz, S. “Why have there been no Great Net Artists,” 1999. Internet: <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php" class="outbound">http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php</a></cite> This leaves little room for domesticity to manoeuvre - unless one redefines the vocabulary.</p>
<p>Artists and writers may see this uniformity as the foundation and promise of digitality. In “Database as a Symbolic,” Manovich argues that “many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” <cite id="note_9" class="note">Manovich, Lev. “Database as a Symbolic,” 1998. Internet: <a href="http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/database.rtf" class="outbound">http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/database.rtf</a></cite> Many female digital artists have embraced this augmented equality of digital matter as the utopian “level playing field” outside of social, patriarchal, or geographic limitations.</p>
<p>Yet, as the medium becomes message (and difference becomes materially inseparable) the quotes of digital visionaries such as McLuhan’s “extensions of man” <cite id="note_10" class="note">McLuhan, M. <span class="booktitle">Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</span>, NY: The MIT Press, 1964 (358).</cite> may appear to take on increasingly literal connotations and, in turn, may contribute to a world lacking in import. A lack of narrative and a collection of static items are indeed alien to the domestic space. In the absence of domestic hierarchies and objects or spaces infused with significance and meaning, the narrative of the kitchen will be lost in favour of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, where there is no space for dirt, noise, children, and domesticity. This will not be a postfeminist space. Still bound by a narcissistic fascination with its own novelty and technological innovation, is net.art being driven to become as equally beautiful and ineffectual as a kitchen full of “smart” processors, blenders and coffee-grinders - and no spoons?</p>
<p>The cyber-domestic aesthetic (CDA) not only seeks to undo and subvert these constraints by using the tools of both the cyber and the domestic, but it seeks to become the “beautiful seams” <cite id="note_11" class="note">Galloway, A. “Intimations of everyday life,” <span class="journaltitle">Cultural Studies</span> 18. 2-3 (2004): 384-408. Internet: <a href="http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=80APWUT7VNY4WAJ4QDA0" class="outbound">http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=80APWUT7VNY4WAJ4QDA0</a></cite> that divide the two. Rather than repressing hierarchical distinctions, the CDA seeks them out and uses them to explore the nuance of repetition in life (much like minimalist music), to discern their value based on social concerns, and to reveal the freight of meaning attached to them through associations, both past and present. Methodologies for CDA net.art are therefore drawn directly from the kitchen and include: repetition, interaction [interactivity], routine, text [subtext], and domestic iconography. Secondary tools, representing the complication of the human presence, include a deliberate use of narrative, personality (as apposed to anonymity), gender (over androgyny), aesthetics, and a questioning of interface/surface relations. The cyber-domestic space is not Augmented but Amplified space. It is reality with the volume turned up.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<h2> </h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jess-loseby">Jess Loseby</a>, <a href="/tags/loseby">loseby</a>, <a href="/tags/cyber">cyber</a>, <a href="/tags/domestic">domestic</a>, <a href="/tags/aesthetic">aesthetic</a>, <a href="/tags/feminis">feminis</a>, <a href="/tags/post-feminism">post-feminism</a>, <a href="/tags/postfeminis">postfeminis</a>, <a href="/tags/new-nedia">new nedia</a>, <a href="/tags/art">art</a>, <a href="/tags/practice">practice</a>, <a href="/tags/netart">net.art</a>, <a href="/tags/patriarch">patriarch</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/catharsis">catharsis</a>, <a href="/tags/vr">VR</a>, <a href="/tags/ar">Ar</a>, <a href="/tags/virtual">virtual</a>, <a href="/tags/augmented">augmented</a>, <a href="/tags/reality">reality</a>, <a href="/tags/repetition">repetition</a>, <a href="/tags/cornford">Cornford</a>, <a href="/tags/habib">Habib</a>, <a href="/tags/galloway">Galloway</a>, <a href="/tags/dietz">Dietz</a>, <a href="/tags/edwards">Edwards</a>, <a href="/tags/g">G</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1082 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/amplified#commentsMedia, Genealogy, Historyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/archival
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Matthew G. Kirschenbaum</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with <span class="booktitle">Understanding Media</span> (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World-Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media. Grusin in fact chairs LCC, and Bolter, who holds an endowed professorship at Tech, is a highly-regarded authority for his work on the hypertext authoring system StorySpace and for an earlier study, <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span> (1992), to which <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is a sequel of sorts. [ <span class="lightEmphasis">Bolter’s book is <a href="/imagenarrative/writingspace" class="internal">reviewed by Anne Burdick</a> in ebr, eds.</span> ] The book therefore asks to be read and received as something of an event, an extended statement from two senior scholars who have been more deeply engaged than most in defining and institutionalizing new media studies.</p>
<p>Much of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s importance is lodged in the title word itself. New media studies has been subjected to a blizzard of neologisms and new terminologies - many of them over-earnest at best - as scholars have struggled to invent a critical vocabulary adequate to discuss hypertexts and myriad other artifacts of digital culture with the same degree of cogency found in a field such as film studies. Bolter and Grusin clearly want “remediation” (the word) to stick, and the volume’s rhetorical momentum is often driven by simple declarative clauses like “By remediation we mean…” and “By remediation we do not mean…” Though the cumulative weight of these phrasings helps remind readers that they are in the presence of two critics in full command of their subject matter, the repetitive stress on “remediation” also produces some odd moments, such as this one from the preface:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It was in May 1996, in a meeting in his office with Sandra Beaudin that RG was reported to have coined the term <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span> as a way to complicate the notion of “repurposing” that Beaudin was working with for her class project. But, as most origin stories go, it was not until well after the fact, when Beaudin reported the coinage to JB, who later reminded RG that he had coined the term, that the concept of “remediation” could be said to have emerged. Indeed, although the term <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span> was coined in RG’s office, neither of us really knew what it meant until we had worked out together the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. (viii)</p>
<p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">Bolter’s more recent collaboration with Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors (2003) applies the concept of immediacy/hypermediacy to graphic design. See Jan Baetens’ <a href="/imagenarrative/designflaw" class="internal">ebr review</a></span> ]</p>
<p>This is writing that itself bears the mark of multiple mediations, from the willfully passive construction of its syntax (“that RG was reported to have coined…”) to the flutter of the keyword remediation from an italicized presentation to scare quotes and back again. I dwell on such details not to be clever, but rather because those visible stress-marks, and the placement of this vignette in the volume’s preface (where it is labeled, tongue-in-cheek, as an “origin story”) both underscore the extent to which language itself is about to be recycled and repurposed in the project that follows. For remediation is not in fact a neologism or a new coinage but rather a paleonym, a word already in use that is recast in wider or different terms: remediation is a word commonly encountered in business, educational, and environmental contexts to denote remedy or reform. Bolter and Grusin do acknowledge this later in the book by discussing remediation’s usage by educators (59), but “remediation” (the word’s) status as a paleonym itself becomes questionable when we realize that Bolter and Grusin clearly expect <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> (the book) to perform exactly this kind of reformative work - most broadly as a corrective to the prevailing notion of the “new” in new media.</p>
<p>For all of this anxiety surrounding its presentation and pedigree, remediation in Bolter and Grusin’s hands is a simple (but not simplistic) concept, and therein lies its appeal:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[W]e call the representation of one medium in another <span class="lightEmphasis">remediation</span>, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (45)</p>
<p>This is, as Bolter and Grusin acknowledge, an insight also shared by McLuhan, who famously declared that the first content of any new medium must be a prior medium. But whereas McLuhan once divided the media sphere into “hot” and “cool” media based on the degree of participation they required (non-participatory media were, somewhat paradoxically, “hot and explosive” in McLuhan’s lexicon, while interactive media were termed “cool”), Bolter and Grusin parse various media forms against what they term the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy.</p>
<p>Immediacy denotes media that aspire to a condition of transparency by attempting to efface all traces of material artifice from the viewer’s perception. Immersive virtual reality, photo realistic computer graphics, and film (in the mainstream Hollywood paradigm) are all examples of media forms that obey the logic of immediacy - the expectation is that the viewer will forget that he or she is watching a movie or manipulating a data glove and be “drawn into” the environment or scene that is depicted for them. Hypermediated phenomena, by contrast, are fascinated by their own status as media constructs and thus call attention to their strategies of mediation and representation. Video games, television, the World-Wide Web, and most multimedia applications subscribe to the logic of hypermediacy. And, as Bolter and Grusin are quick to claim, “our two seemingly contradictory logics not only coexist in digital media today but are mutually dependent” (6). This co-dependency inaugurates what they refer to as the “double logic of remediation,” which finds expression as follows: “Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all” (55).</p>
<p>Once articulated, the ideas behind remediation are quickly grasped and readers may find themselves seeing (I stress <span class="lightEmphasis">seeing</span> - Bolter and Grusin’s critical orientation is overwhelmingly visual) remediations everywhere. It also becomes clear, as Bolter and Grusin themselves suggest, that remediation is the formal analogue of the marketing strategy commonly known as repurposing, whereby a Hollywood film (say) will spawn a vast array of product tie-ins, from video games to action figures to fast-food packages and clothing accessories. This practice raises a daunting set of questions for those concerned with matters of textual theory, for if we grant that a film (or an action figure) can be a text, we are then obliged to re-evaluate much of what we think we know about textual authority and textual transmission in this late age of mechanical reproduction - by what formal, material, or generic logic could we define the ontological horizon of the repurposed text known as “Star Wars?” Likewise, when one refers to “Wired,” is one speaking of just the printed newsstand version of the magazine or is one speaking of the multivalent media property that now cultivates a variety of vertically integrated distribution networks, including: an imprint for printed books about cyberculture, <span class="booktitle">HardWired</span>; an online forum and Web portal, <span class="booktitle">HotWired</span>; separate Web presences for the magazine itself as well as affiliated online ventures (which include <span class="booktitle">WiredNews</span>), <span class="booktitle">LiveWired</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Suck</span>); and two search engines, <span class="booktitle">HotBot</span> and <span class="booktitle">NewsBot</span>. That recognition of this broader media identity is central to any discussion of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span> the magazine is dramatized by the fact that as of this writing the URL <a href="http://www.wired.com" class="outbound">http://www.wired.com</a> deflects visitors from the site of the magazine proper to the aforementioned <span class="booktitle">WiredNews</span> - which only then offers a subordinate link to the Web presence for the newsstand version of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span> (which is itself of course an electronic remediation of the printed content). In retrospect, it seems odd that Bolter and Grusin do not make more of <span class="booktitle">Wired</span>, both because of the complex media ecology outlined above and because in it we have an artifact of print culture that, largely on the basis of graphic design and strong marketing, has remediated the experience of “cyberspace” so successfully that the word “wired” itself has become a popular synecdoche for the Information Age.</p>
<p>Some extended case studies of that sort (MTV would have been another natural) might have added much to the book, but instead its middle section is taken up by more generic surveys of various media forms - computer games, photo realistic graphics, film, television, virtual reality, the World Wide Web, and others - and these are a mixed lot. The chapters on computer games, graphics, television, and film are generally strong. Bolter and Grusin have an enviable feel for the subtle relationships that obtain between media forms, and they are at their best during moments such as a discussion of <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> when they argue convincingly that the game - frequently remarked upon for the “realism” of its graphics - succeeds not via the logic of immediacy, but rather by <span class="lightEmphasis">remediating</span> the immediacy of Hollywood film; they press the point home by observing that there are in fact hundreds of examples of video games adapted from mainstream films (98). Their argument about virtual reality’s lineage in film is equally suggestive: “One way to understand virtual reality, therefore, is as a remediation of the subjective style of film, an exercise in identification through offering a visual point of view… In their treatments [ <span class="booktitle">Brainstorm</span>, <span class="booktitle">Lawnmower Man</span>, <span class="booktitle">Johnny Mnemonic</span>, <span class="booktitle">Disclosure</span>, <span class="booktitle">Strange Days</span> ] Hollywood writers grasped instantly (as did William Gibson in his novel <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span>) that virtual reality is about the definition of the self and the relationship of the body to the world” (165-166). What is compelling here is not so much the notion that virtual reality is about “the definition of self and the relationship of the body to the world,” but rather the confidence with which Bolter and Grusin are able to identify a specific filmic technique - the subjective camera, prominent in all the titles mentioned above - and align it with the popular rhetoric surrounding virtual reality, thereby foregrounding the artificial imperatives of both media forms.</p>
<p>But at times the middle chapters also seem sparsely developed. That same chapter on virtual reality, for example, is only seven pages long (including illustrations), and it includes no discussion of any functional VR systems beyond mention of research by Georgia Tech’s Larry Hodges. Likewise, the only electronic artist to receive any individual treatment in the chapter on digital arts is Jeffrey Shaw, who is perhaps best know for an installation piece entitled <span class="booktitle">The Legible City</span>, now a decade old. At other times, elements of the historical record which it would have been desirable to have on hand are simply missing. A discussion of the video game Pong, for example, offers the tantalizing suggestion that its fundamentally graphical orientation, compared to contemporary UNIX and DOS command line interfaces, “suggested new formal and cultural purposes for digital technology” (90). Yet we are not given any specific date for Pong’s first release, or for the releases of its many subsequent versions and variations (which it would have been interesting to track across different platforms); nor do we learn who first programmed the game, or where, or why. Absences of this kind detract from the usefulness of the middle sections as basic references for students of new media.</p>
<p>Given the scope of the attempted coverage in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s middle sections - where the topics range from Renaissance painting and animated film to telepresent computing and “mediated spaces” (e.g., Disneyland) - lapses of the kind I note above are perhaps inevitable. And indeed, very early on in the book Bolter and Grusin offer a familiar kind of disclaimer: “We cannot hope to explore the genealogy of remediation in detail. What concerns us is remediation in our current media in North America, and here we can analyze specific texts, images, and uses” (21). But this emphasis on the “specific” is itself a scholarly move that, as Alan Liu and others have demonstrated, bears with it deep implications for any critical project conducted under the broad sign of cultural criticism, a point to which I will return (below).</p>
<p>But some remaining features of the book deserve notice first: <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is lovingly illustrated, and Bolter and Grusin deserve credit for the care with which the images were selected and reproduced. The juxtaposition of the front page of <span class="booktitle">USA Today’s</span> printed edition with the home page of <span class="booktitle">USA Today</span> on the Web (40-41) or the comparison of stills from a 1980 CNN air check with a more contemporary broadcast format from CNN in 1997 (190-191) do as much to underscore the essential rightness of the core remediation concept as any number of expository passages in the text. The first and third sections of the book also include reference pointers to relevant passages from the survey of media forms in the middle section - these are “the printed equivalent of hyperlinks” (14), and some readers may find them occasionally convenient. <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> ‘s third and final section examines logics of remediation in relation to contemporary conceptions of the self (readers who have already done their homework with Sandy Stone or Sherry Turkle may find themselves skimming these pages). The bibliography, with about 175 entries, is useful. And finally, there is the obligatory glossary; it will mark a significant milestone in the maturity of new media studies as a discipline when one can publish a book in the field without feeling the need to define for the lay-reader “virtual reality” or “MOO” (or “media,” for that matter: “Plural of medium” [274]).</p>
<p>Near the end of the book, Bolter and Grusin offer an account of the media coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral precession: “Because the funeral itself occurred for American audiences in the middle of the night, CBS decided to run a videotape of the whole ceremony later in the morning. At that same time, however, the precession was still carrying Diana’s body to its final resting place. The producers of the broadcast thus faced the problem of providing two image streams to their viewers” (269). The solution CBS adopted was to divide the screen into two separate windows, one displaying the funeral ceremony and the other the procession. Bolter and Grusin point out that this move marks a shift from the desire for immediacy and “authenticity” of experience that normally governs live TV to a logic of hypermediacy that places the emphasis on the media apparatus itself; but the more interesting point, I think, is that this particular broadcast solution was viable because CBS could count on its audience having already been exposed to bifurcated screen-spaces through the assimilation of the computer desktop and its attendant interface conventions into the cultural mainstream. Bracketing technical considerations, it seems reasonable to argue that CBS could not have opted for the two-window solution in an earlier era of television because the visual environment would have simply been too alien from their viewers’ expectations. Bolter and Grusin go on to note that, “other and perhaps better examples (both of hypermediacy and remediation) will no doubt appear, as each new event tops the previous ones in its excitement or the audacity of its claims to immediacy” (270). Had this closing chapter been written today, Bolter and Grusin would have almost certainly chosen as their example the multi-window displays that facilitated the so-called “surreal” split-screen television coverage of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings and Operation Desert Fox (the American and British air strikes on Iraq) in December of 1998.</p>
<p>That the conflicting logics of immediacy (in the desire for live “eyewitness” coverage of two major news events transpiring simultaneously) and hypermediacy (in the <a href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev9/r9kir/r9kir1.htm" class="outbound">spectacle</a> of video feeds from Washington and Baghdad both on the screen at the same time, each in a separate content window, the display filled out by a lurid background “wallpaper” graphic) manifested themselves so dramatically in one of the most notable media events of recent memory surely confirms the usefulness of remediation as a critical armature for contemporary media studies. But it is worth noting that Bolter and Grusin explicitly describe their technique in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> as genealogical (“a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history” [55]), and therefore I’d like to close this review with some additional words about genealogy, and its suitability to new media studies by contrast with other varieties of historicism.</p>
<p>Genealogy as a critical mode comes to us from Foucault; it is most closely associated with his later books such as <span class="booktitle">Discipline and Punish</span> and the three volumes of the <span class="booktitle">History of Sexuality</span>. Genealogy is distinct from Foucault’s other famous method, archeology, deployed most fully in works like <span class="booktitle">The Order of Things</span> and <span class="booktitle">The Birth of the Clinic</span>. Foucault’s most sustained articulation of genealogy is to be found in a 1971 essay entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” whose opening lines are these: “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (76). A few pages later, we read:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations - or conversely, the complete reversals - the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (81)</p>
<p>Bolter and Grusin acknowledge this same essay, and indeed quote from it in their first footnote. Yet it seems questionable how much the “genealogy” of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> really resembles what Foucault imagined by the term. True, Bolter and Grusin’s narrative of media forms is not linear (or rather, it is not chronological), but their narrative is also “documentary” only in the most casual sense and it operates at a level of detail far removed from Foucault’s trademark archival research. Indeed, of the many books published on topics related to new media studies in recent years, none of them, it seems to me, has yet matched the level of documentary (archival) research evident in a work such as Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie’s <span class="booktitle">Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft</span> (1998). A typical passage from Cusumano and Yoffie (who are business professors) reads like this:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In August 1994, the Seattle-based start-up Spry became the first company to market a commercial version of Mosaic. At least half a dozen non-NCSA-based browsers were also available or in the works. In addition to Netscape’s Navigator, competitors also included Cello, developed at Cornell; BookLink’s InterNet Works; the MCC consortium’s MacWeb; O’Reilly and Associates Viola; and Frontier Technologies’s WinTapestry. By early 1995, <span class="booktitle">PC Magazine</span> declared that 10 Web browsers were “essentially complete”[…] In April 1995, <span class="booktitle">Internet World</span> counted 24 browsers, and by the end of the year CNET had found 28 browsers worthy of review. Very few of those products had any appreciable market share. (95-96)</p>
<p>How soon we forget. Cello, WebTapestry, even Mosaic. Where are they now? Whole generations of software technologies (compressed with the week- and month-long micro-cycles of “Internet Time”) are already lost to us. But surely this level of detail - conspicuous in the InterCapped names of bygone products and technologies, punctuated by the antiquarian version numbers of specific hardware and software implementations - ought to be a key element of any historical method, genealogical or otherwise, that critics working in new media studies bring to bear.</p>
<p>Let me suggest that the start-up work of theorizing digital culture has by now largely been done, and that serious and sustained attention to archival and documentary sources is the next step for new media studies if it is to continue to mature as a field. Freidrich Kittler’s <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks 1800/1900</span> already does some of this work. And we could also do worse than <span class="booktitle">Internet Time</span> for a summation of the pace of scholarship in new media studies to date, with fresh books (<span class="lightEmphasis">books</span>: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/redirect.html/002-2203603-5988855" class="outbound">the medium signifies</a>) on matters cyber, virtual, or hyper appearing almost weekly. But where in all this are the careful analyses of the white papers and technical reports (for example) that must lie behind the changing broadcast strategies Bolter and Grusin point to at CNN? Where are the interviews with the network’s executives and with their media consultants and market analysts? Rather than speculate broadly about computer graphics or theories of digital reproduction, why not perform a detailed case study of one particular data format, such as JPEG or GIF (which has a fascinating history) or a particular software implementation such as QuickTime, which has been enormously influential to multimedia development as it has evolved through multiple versions and generations? Certainly there are practical constraints that might mitigate against such projects: would Apple unlock its technical reports and developers’ notes on QuickTime for a scholar writing a book? It is hard to know, but: Netscape did it for Cusumano and Yoffie.</p>
<p>A few more thoughts in this vein. Compared to other scholarly fields, new media studies has thus far operated within relatively limited horizons of historicism. Historical perspective in books on digital culture generally takes one of two forms: it is either broadly comparative or it is transparently narrative. Bolter’s earlier book, <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span>, is a classic example of the former mode, contextualizing hypertext (very usefully) within a much longer history of writing. Sandy Stone’s pages describing the final days of the Atari Lab in <span class="booktitle">The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age</span> is an example of the latter narrative mode, as is the writing in such pop-history books as Simon and Schuster’s <span class="booktitle">Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet</span>. But both the comparative and the narrative modes encourage a relatively casual kind of historiographic writing. N. Katherine Hayles’ just-published <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>, which I am reading now, is perhaps the beginning of something new, offering a more rigorous kind of historical inquiry. <a href="/criticalecologies/machinic" class="internal">thREAD to the Linda Brigham’s review of Hayles</a> But Hayles still does not approach the level of self-reflexivity evident in a work like James Chandler’s <span class="booktitle">England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism</span>, published last year by Chicago, in which Chandler historicizes history itself as a peculiarly Romantic category of knowledge, while simultaneously undertaking a meticulous investigation of the events of a single pivotal year in the development of British Romanticism. A brief passage from the preface, to suggest the flavor of the volume:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Within part 1, the first section, “Writing Historicism, Then and Now,” tries to establish a way of talking about “dated-specificity” in literary-cultural studies that makes patent the repetition between the “spirit of the age” discourse of British Romanticism and the contemporary discourse of the “return to history” in the Anglo-American Academy. The second section…moves from the notion of historical culture implicit in that “dated specificity” to consider the representation practices that such a notion of culture presupposes or demands… Then, having established how one might understand England in 1819 as a historical case, its literature as a historicizing casuistry, I turn…to explicate a series of works, all produced or consumed in that year, as cases in respect to that larger frame of reference. (xvi-xvii)</p>
<p>Chandler is ultimately ambivalent about the academy’s current insistence on “dated specificity” (including the sort I have been calling for above), as is his fellow-Romanticist <a href="http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp" class="outbound">Alan Liu</a> in “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail,” a seminal essay which ought to be required reading for anyone working in a field of cultural study, including media studies. Liu makes the telling point that recent critical-historical modes, from Foucauldian genealogy to cultural anthropology and the literary New Historicism, all thrive on an unexamined rhetoric that consecrates what he terms the “virtuosity of the detail” (80), a rhetoric which Liu is then able to convincingly align with the most familiar tenets of Romantic “local” transcendence, such that: “insignificance becomes the trope of transcendent meaning” (93).</p>
<p>Liu’s critique is too complex and finely-developed to go into here any further, but it underscores a fundamental crisis in new media studies today: the field, having really flourished only since the early nineties, has on the one hand not yet had occassion to undertake the kind of detailed case histories I advocate above; yet case studies (their “dated specificity”) are, on the other hand, already themselves being historicized as of a particular institutional moment. There is, for example, something to be learned from the curious genealogy of the font family known - fateful name - as Localizer (see <a href="http://www.fontfont.de/packages/locali10461/locali10461.html" class="outbound">FontFont</a>). Released in 1996, the Localizer font mimics late-seventies LCD technology in an era when state-of-the-art digital typesetting permits perfect anti-aliasing. (Localizer is of course a classic remediation. Its design notes read in part: “we thought this would be the future, then it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter after all, so here it is.”) Layers and layers of media history are perhaps held in delicate high-res suspension among such exteriorities of accidents. Yet at present, new media studies apparently lacks the deep historical self-reflexivity necessary to undertake a genealogy of the Localizer font that would not also appear naive in the face of a critique such as Liu’s.</p>
<p>All of this is not to be taken as a criticism of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> itself, for Bolter and Grusin would surely (and fairly) object that a book engaging the particular issues I have been raising here was simply not the book they set out to write. Nonetheless, the probable success of a book such as <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> only intensifies the realization that new media studies now faces disciplinary challenges that go far beyond building a critical vocabulary and syntax. I will go on record as saying that in order for new media studies to move beyond its current 1.0 generation of scholarly discourse - a discourse which is still largely, though not exclusively, descriptive and explanatory (all those glossaries!) - the field must make a broad-based commitment to serious archival research. Of course the archive is more likely to be found at venues such as Xerox PARC or IBM or Microsoft or Apple - or in a Palo Alto garage - than at the library and rare book room. But case studies of specific hardware and software implementations, and of the micro-events in the commercial and institutional environments in which those implementations are developed and deployed are absolutely essential if we are to begin achieving deeper understandings of the impact of new media on the culture at large. (An example of one such “micro-event”: March 31, 1998. Netscape Communications Corporation posts the source code for its 5.0 generation of browsers on its public Web site in an attempt to recapture market-share from Microsoft. This, I submit, is the real stuff of which new media history is being made.) Those case studies can - should - be theoretically informed, building on the groundwork of a book such as <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>.</p>
<p>There is no task more important for new media studies than demystifing the unequivocally material processes of development now at work in the high-tech industry. Doing that work, and doing it right, will take time - archive time, not Internet Time.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt;—&gt; <a href="/criticalecologies/Adornian" class="internal">Jan Baetens responds</a>.</p>
<p>——————————————————————</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. [Note: All citations in this review are from a pre-press review copy of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>, provided by the MIT Press.]</p>
<p>Chandler, James. <span class="booktitle">England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Cusumano, Michael A. and David B. Yoffie. <span class="booktitle">Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscapes and Its Battle with Microsoft</span>. New York: The Free Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Foucault, Michel. ” Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” <span class="booktitle">The Foucault Reader</span>. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100.</p>
<p>Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. <span class="booktitle">Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet</span>. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Kittler, Freidrich. <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks 1800/1900</span>. Trans. Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.</p>
<p>Liu, Alan. “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail.” <span class="booktitle">Representation 32</span> (Fall 1990): 75-113.</p>
<p>McLuhan, H. Marshall. <span class="booktitle">Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964, 1994.</p>
<p>Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. <span class="booktitle">The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/bolter">bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/grusin">grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/kittler">kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/communication">communication</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/beaudin">beaudin</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/chandler">chandler</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/kirschenbaum">kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/matthew-kirschenbaum">matthew kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/matt-kirschenbaum">matt kirschenbaum</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web">world-wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web-0">world wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/cusmano">cusmano</a>, <a href="/tags/yoffie">yoffie</a>, <a href="/tags/jeffrey-shaw">jeffrey shaw</a>, <a href="/tags/legible-city">legible city</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator729 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/archival#commentsJoseph McElroy's Cyborg Plushttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/seeing
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Salvatore Proietti</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. All around <span class="booktitle">Plus</span></h2>
<p>What do we gain in looking at Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> as, among other things, a science-fiction novel? <cite id="note_1">Along with the experience of translating <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> and the essay ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” into Italian, I recently had two chances in Rome to talk about McElroy, a doctoral seminar on Beckett and a conference on Emerson. I acknowledge my gratitude to the organizers, Professors Agostino Lombardo, Giorgio Mariani, and Igina Tattoni, as well as to Daniela Daniele who first alerted me about this project.</cite> In science fiction, a literalized metaphor is extended and made to become the narrative center of a possible, estranged world, as theorists have argued (cf. Suvin). My reading of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> focuses on the presence of the icon of the compound entity, organic and technological at the same time, which science and science fiction have called the “cyborg.” Throughout its history, this metaphor has been put to manifold uses: agent of unrestrained power and authority, form of absolute subjection and dispossession, attempt at hopeful interaction between humans and technology.</p>
<p>Despite long and sustained attention from critics, science fiction appears not to have made it into respectability, and cautious caveats continue to accompany many readers’ responses when facing texts and authors deemed worthy of critical praise. In the specific case of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, critics have both argued and denied its generic status (respectively, cf. LeClair’s introduction to the 1987 edition [v], and Hadas), and only in the 1990s did references to the cyborg begin to appear (Tabbi 145). In general, analyzing such a struggle for legitimacy would lead a long way into both aesthetic and institutional issues, in which old-fashioned standards of timelessness are still applied by commentators who regard with suspicion the use of metaphors whose “technological” or “scientific” signifiers (whether coming from “hard” or “soft” sciences) are hopelessly bound to historical contingency, haunted by the specter of a readership not necessarily coinciding with the “distinction” of canonicity. With regard to McElroy, the “disproportion between accomplishment and recognition” pointed out by Tom LeClair (ibid.) might precisely stem from an emphasis on science unparalleled among contemporary Anglophone novelists.</p>
<p>For our purposes, it might suffice to say that <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is, among other things, the best science-fiction novel written in the 1970s by a non-specialized writer. Formally speaking, its focus on the standpoint of the cyborg, providing an inside view of the consciousness of the (semi-)artificial intelligence, brings <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> closer to a genre novel such as Pat Cadigan’s 1993 <span class="booktitle">Fools</span> (another novel about a search for memories) rather than to a highbrow take such as Richard Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>: if the latter is a novel about the confrontation with the posthuman, McElroy and Cadigan’s protagonists try to enact what <span class="lightEmphasis">being</span> posthuman might be like.</p>
<p>Among McElroy’s works, the presence of science-fictional motifs also haunts <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. And in going through the essays reprinted in his recent Italian collection, <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>, one finds many references to science-fiction writers and works: from precursors such as Samuel Butler (16) and Jules Verne (38); to contemporary genre classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s <span class="booktitle">2001: A Space Odyssey</span> (32-4, 37), J. G. Ballard (47, 55, 64, 76), and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s <span class="booktitle">The Sirens of Titan</span>, in conjunction with mentions of William Burroughs and cyberpunk (75); to non-specialized examples such as Richard Powers (78), John Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span> (34, 54, 76), William Hjortsberg’s cyborg novel <span class="booktitle">Gray Matters</span> (58), and Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics</span> cycle, along with a story from that cycle’s immediate model in Italian literature, Primo Levi’s collection <span class="booktitle">The Periodic Table</span> (69-70). <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> also contains reviews of Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> (115-9) and Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> (125-9), both at least marginally science-fictional texts. To these I would add the mentions of Doris Lessing’s <span class="booktitle">The Four-Gated City</span> and, again, of Calvino in LeClair and McCaffery’s interview (238, 244) - different facets in a consistent tradition of literature exploring the territories of science.</p>
<p>The metaphor of the cyborg has a very long history in 20th century science and science fiction, which here can only be hinted at. <cite id="note_2">I tried to examine this history in my unpublished PhD dissertation. For some probings into cyberpunk discourse, cf. my “Jeremiad” and “Bodies.”</cite> Heads or minds separated from bodies: an age-old dream, or nightmare, with intertextual resonances emerging so strongly that isolating dominant texts and filiations is virtually impossible. Much is at stake in this metaphor and in all discourses evoking it, with fiction and nonfiction creating two parallel histories with mutually communicating rhetorics. Since the beginning in the 1920s, in the speculations of scientists such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, personal body, body politic, and space have been interacting. In Bernal’s <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span> (1929), the “colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary” (73): cosmic policing and prosthetic technology will free the human mind from all material fetters and ensure its undying control over the universe. Individual self-sufficiency and will to expansiveness are the collective ideals incarnated in a view of the body such as that of Alexis Carrel, Nobel-prize winning pioneer of transplant technology, who sees in his popular <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span> (1935) skin and body surfaces as “the almost perfect fortified frontier of a closed world” (65).</p>
<p>And since the 1930s, U.S. pulp authors powerfully include semi-artificial humans and brains encased in boxes in the repertoire of their imagery, often drawing on Darwinian and eugenic myths: tales on transparent eyeballs being nothing and seeing all, dominating space and other people, parables on technoscientific hubris, in different degrees of tension between empowerment and socialization.</p>
<p>Officially, the birth of the cyborg takes place in 1960 at a conference held at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, in a paper delivered by physicians Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes, entitled “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” In their view, the cyborg prefigures the advent and triumph of “participant evolution”: (military) science and technology are about to make possible the planning and designing of infinite variants of <span class="lightEmphasis">homo sapiens</span>, able to live long and prosper in the worlds of space exploration. This new entity “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.” Body processes and the attendant “robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, thus freeing man to explore, to create, to think, and to feel” (347-8). Their epic narrative of mastery over the universe, while ostensibly foregrounding a pluralism of embodiments, posits not only a mechanistic view of the body, but also a faith and hope in its irrelevance and coming supersession: the self-regulating, homeostatic balance along the boundary of the interface between organic and inorganic components renders the cyborg less an empowered body than an armored mind. The body mechanic is the body obsolete, a pure thinking apparatus, who has broken free of the devilish materiality of world and flesh: a literal self-made man, capable of “adapting his body to whatever milieu he chooses (345).</p>
<p>With its Protean self-making act and its asocial expansive thrust, the cyborg is ready to connect into the mainstream of U.S. national mythology. Following in the steps of early cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, Kline and Clynes also present their creation as conqueror of a “New Frontier” (347). In this vein, before cyberpunk made science fiction part of the postmodernist narrative, two decades crowded with theory, fiction, and popularization had established a rhetoric centered on the drive toward the limitless frontiers of scientific imagination. This rhetoric, turning ostensible symbiosis and coupling into (self)instrumentalization, was - and to a great extent still is - divided between celebrations of omnipotence soon to come and specular humanistic recoils from reification, but united in saluting the cyborg, either with enthusiasm or with dismay, as a new beginning for the American self (cderf. Martin), launched toward definitive abandonment of the body and of history: Leo Marx’s technological sublime as a dream come true for the individual and as an analogue for the nation (cf. Wilson).</p>
<p>As studies such as Mark Dery’s <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity</span> and N. Katherine Hayles’ <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> show, at the core of much theorizing about the posthuman still lie those same dreams - informed with a technological determinism which figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have updated and popularized for the contemporary age. From the science-fiction field the responses to this finalistic narrative have been more nuanced, exploring the cyborg identity in detail, with a keener awareness that both personal bodies and the body politic are made of very resistant materials, all of which (including ethics and language) must be considered on their own terms. The very root of the genre, inherent to the idea that science and technology can become usable tools for literature, is a deep faith in metaphor, in the hope that possible worlds can be created in the reader’s mind capable of providing estranged versions of its own world. As Darko Suvin writes, these fictions are complex parables, not mechanic allegories (“homologies,” as McElroy describes his attempt in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> in many of his essays: cf. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” and <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> 81): linguistic creations, but nevertheless narratively solid and reconstructible, always meant to achieve an inner consistency. In this, science fiction has always proposed a challenge that appears to escape the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology, between world and interpretation: the science-fictional worlds have at their center an “absent paradigm” (Angenot) just as Faulkner’s have at their center a “climactic ellipsis” (Materassi) <cite id="note_3">Both these notions (ironically resonating, I realize as I write, with the matter at hand), in different ways, might also be pertinent to the themes of McElroy’s The Letter Left to Me, a novel of endurance in the face of loss whose Beckettian undertones are no less strong than those of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.</cite> : the interpretive quest of the reader, ultimately, consists in recostructing the world the narration itself is an emanation of. Therefore, I would maintain that the relevance of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> lies in its taking its central metaphor seriously and in its own terms. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> goes much further and deeper than texts that “simply” (quotation marks are due, of course, in order not to unduly belittle achievements such as Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span> or Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span>) explore it for its impact on an observer who is participant but ultimately safely on the outside of the boundary between science and the body. Thus, I would argue that one tenor of McElroy’s multiplex parable is the assertion that such a somewhat nostalgic intellectual figure still belonging to a separate sphere is no longer conceivable. McElroy’s cyborg’s tale “told from within” is an example of pure science fiction, of what science fiction should be, of what all important science fiction manages to be.</p>
<h2>2. In Touch with Imp Plus</h2>
<p>In the critical mainstream surrounding <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, many have read the novel as an example of a “world elsewhere” created by an empowered self (cf. Brooke-Rose; LeClair, Art 144-6; Miller), a Cartesian subject dominating a literally mechanized <span class="lightEmphasis">res extensa</span>. In such analyses, cybernetics provides a template for self-sustaining aesthetic autonomy (cf. Porush, <span class="booktitle">Fiction</span>). Rather, I would read <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, the interior monologue of the brain of a dying scientist implanted into an orbiting satellite, as an early metafictional, intertextual critique of the rhetoric of absolute, empowering openness, and of transcendence through disembodiment.</p>
<p>My analysis will follow, in the progress of Imp Plus’ linguistic and cognitive self-awareness, the tension between openness and closure, between expansion (or retreat?) into an undifferentiated void and the (re)discovery and inescapable necessity of coming to terms with its own new bodily being, with the world and with otherness. I will read its final act as the double rejection of both the myth of the instrumental body and of the myth of unfettered expansiveness - that is, of the most widespread ideological assumptions underlying the rhetoric of human-technological interfaces (either in the years preceding the publication of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> or in much current “cyberculture”).</p>
<p>As the novel starts, the explanted brain is indeed a literalization of Emerson’s classic transparent eyeball scenario: a <span class="lightEmphasis">tabula rasa</span> hooked into an “Interplanetary Monitoring Platform” experimenting on solar energy storing devices, perceiving himself against the background of a surrounding void. But in the very act of self-perception - an act of feeling, an act of imagining - Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span> is powerfully revised:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was itself, but felt it was more.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around, and this was not the start. (3)</p>
<p>For Imp Plus, this feeling of openness and openendedness brings about the awareness of a previous existence. The emergence of his own self is never privileged as a creation <span class="lightEmphasis">ex nihilo</span>, and involves a two-way traffic, a true interaction between subject and world. Imp Plus’ acquisition of language also starts from scraps of past and present experiences and not from scratch. Consistent with this, language and vision (being and understanding, ontology and epistemology, self-scrutiny and outward observation) are facets of the same drive: ” <span class="lightEmphasis">see</span> was the need or effect of <span class="lightEmphasis">say</span> ” (143). As in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Divinity School Address</span>, here too “always the seer is the sayer. Somehow his dream is told…clearest and most permanent in words” (78). Imp Plus’ first metalinguistic remark is about sight: “Socket was a word” (3). In learning how to see himself, he learns how to say himself. This is the experience he describes, over and over, as “lifting,” as he acquires (at once acquiring again and acquiring anew) the language with which to express his condition, and to communicate it to others. What he perceives and communicates, though - and this is definitely unlike Emerson - is the birth of a body. The attempt of overcoming dispossession and instrumentalization can only be predicated on physical existence; his first attempts at articulate communications will be about the development of his new perceptual system, centering on the imagery of growth - a growth involving a process of cellular fusion and differentiation of unheard-of proportions, and allowing a new consciousness, capable of acting beyond originally programmed routine operations, to emerge together with the new body.</p>
<p>From the very first page of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, memories start coming in, sketches from a fragmented mind trickling in recurring associations, scenes, as well as isolated words and phrases. And what makes this protagonist unforgettably moving is his unceasing quest for love among the ruins of a past which does not even yield his “human” name: moments back on Earth, ill and dying, with wife and daughter; moments with a “woman at the California sea,” and with another one met shortly before the final operation of brain excision, “by the Mexican fire” (109), which also triggers images of birds and the sun. In the past and in the present, in emotions and body, the sun resonates as a salvific force, just like the repeated reminiscence about the encounter with the blind, bandaged “news vendor,” who manages to compensate for his sightlessness and keeps trying to perceive the world. Most disturbing are the conversations with the “Acrid Voice,” who tells him that the eventual orbital decay of the satellite might somehow be controlled (perhaps with the brain’s own help), so that he might be recovered, but who left too many doubts to be fully believable.</p>
<p>In the following chapters the disordered accumulation of memories slowly and progressively coalesces into semantic clusters of highly specialized languages associated with biology, alternating and coexisting with an initially minimal vocabulary, articulated through an incremental process of linguistic redundancy and overload (cf. LeClair “McElroy”), of repetition with variants:</p>
<p>Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good. (3)</p>
<p>If Imp Plus is a cyborg, it is one very much like that of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” among many other reasons because in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> there is no nostalgia for any idealized past experience: Imp Plus’ past as an integral human is one source of his present state as an integrated cyborg, not the goal or hope of a fullness he strives for. As the new identity develops, the organic and the inorganic are bound to interact, without according either component any superior or inferior status. And this past has no intrinsic ethical connotations, is the site of both positive and negative present sensations.</p>
<p>In the above quoted third paragraph, ethics is introduced in the shape of ambiguity: there are, within Imp Plus’ words, a number of types and meanings of “lifting,” and the option between good and bad shows up as inescapable, if not always with a clear-cut value judgment following it: the lifting of the brain from the body (from “the skull”), the launch into space, the activation of the new system of (self-)perception. And somewhere in the background, an echo from that solitary “head” in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span>, “uplifted into infinite space”, intent on being “nothing” and “see[ing] all,” throwing at the self and at others a literal and imaginative imperative: “Build…your own world” (Emerson 6, 46). Here, though, there is no lifted mind prior to the world-building striving: the entire novel, indeed, portrays the mutual construction of a subject and its surroundings. Linking both is the former’s will to existence, a choice and a longing which for the semiartificial being is no less (perhaps, more), as it were, heartfelt than it would be for an ordinary human.</p>
<p>The only automatism in Imp Plus’ action is his choosing to perceive its own self, rejecting the position of mere “monitor,” receptor or reflector, passively intent on perceiving the outside. In doing so, he refuses the master narrative of the cyborg as instrumental body (upheld by cyberneticians and other rhapsodes of the posthuman), which means for him being <span class="lightEmphasis">somebody else’s</span> instrument, and instead embraces another longing, which sees the technologizing of the body as the possible catalyst for a new fulfilling relation between subject and object. There is a contest for autonomy going on inside the cyborg body, but it is a contest in which there is no direct relation between component and axiology: organic vs. inorganic are not equated to whole vs. reified (as in classic liberal attitudes) or to obsolete vs. futuristic (as in teleologic-posthumanist speculations). Both elements can be the site of such a contest, and their inevitable interaction can bring about further complication; as Haraway writes, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war [involving] <span class="lightEmphasis">pleasure</span> in the construction of boundaries and… <span class="lightEmphasis">responsibility</span> in their construction” (150).</p>
<p>Many are the boundaries crossed by McElroy’s cyborg self. Fragmented as he is, Imp Plus (the “more,” the “Plus” supplementing the “he” with the “it” - after all, “Imp Plus” = “I am “Plus,” as noted by LeClair [“McElroy” 35]) will become a multiply inclusive being, holding together two <span class="lightEmphasis">kinds</span> of components, not just two items: organic elements include the brain and the nutrients he is inserted in (vegetables and glucose are mentioned), connected with several computer and measuring systems. In this way, the “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin) of this science-fictional situation presents the reader with a surprising, hopeful possibility of heterogeneous wholeness; as McElroy said in his interview with LeClair and McCaffery, “I also saw in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> the good old theme of reintegrating the body and the soul, a dynamic drama of growth, unexpected growth” (239). And, as he commented in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” about the reformulation of personal autonomy in the age of technology: “In <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in Imp Plus, you have something in between instrument and person. In the beginning you do.”</p>
<p>In this complicated drama of desire and frustration, all the verbal games redefine but never erase the presence of a consciousness. Whereas the reader might be baffled by the juxtaposition of indirect and free indirect discourse, in the novel most glaring for his listeners on Earth is the confusion within Imp Plus’ communication between the speech of his operative functions and the speech of self-reflection, which leads him to evoke the “shadows” of his memories in one of his dialogues with Ground Control: “The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission” (11). Bakhtinian and not Chomskyan, he has the ability to think dialogically; his self-perception is connected to communication with others. And he learns how to lie.</p>
<p>If Imp Plus opens his self-expression by talking about an opening, as he begins to gain some degree of self-awareness, the awareness of a distinction between self and world, between the <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> and the <span class="lightEmphasis">it</span> of his first sentence, brings about a degree of closure. As in frontier discourse the advance of the settlement can only be the cause of a receding of the open territory, in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> pleasure can only be shaped by the needs and responsibilities of selfhood:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination, a sharp drop.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He?… The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So some of the gradients were Imp Plus.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Which was why he could fall into himself. (6)</p>
<p>Imp Plus’ outward drive, almost immediately, encounters the limitations of identity, even as he strives toward other purposes (“aims”) than those imposed upon him by the controlling agencies from Earth, and finds among the signals another sight worth detecting (that is, himself). As the potential becomes actual, as that “chance” becomes the possibility of “something” specific, his vocabulary translates all this into images of a downhill course: a Fall for the cyborg.</p>
<p>At the end of Chapter 2, already “the more that was all around was getting closer and closer to Imp Plus” (22): as he builds himself, he also builds a boundary <span class="lightEmphasis">around</span> his self, meeting constriction while at the same time looking for freedom. In this condition, the cybernetic feedback of a character bootstrapping himself into selfhood can only appear as suffering, as the loss of a Beckettian sort of pre-Oedipal bliss: “He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was himself. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone” (98).</p>
<p>As flashes and associations keep bringing back his past existence, body and human connections become a pervasive “absence” (136), “emptiness” (195), “vacancy” (196), which must be compared with the present situation: “Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become” (142). At the threshold between past embodiment and present disembodiment, Imp Plus imagines himself as a personified “fence” (151, 159), imposing limits upon what could only have been a source of perfect fulfillment as an unfulfilled promise of boundless openness to be contemplated from the edge. As Imp Plus’ memory progresses - as his contacts with Ground Control continue - past connections appear more and more vivid and more and more distant, in “an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought” (212).</p>
<p>Words are also presences surrounding him and linking him with Earth: Ground Control, Travel Light (Travelling on Light, Operation TL), Cap Com, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice, and the Dim Echo, which is both outside Imp Plus’ new being and a part of him, wholly subordinate to the Ground agencies - ironically, the closest thing to an “original” self he can claim (and whom he can access far less easily than Ground). For Imp Plus and for the reader of his story, the ghostly presence he calls the Dim Echo is an ominous, cold reminder that the semi-artificial being might be more human (more humane) than the remnants of his flesh-and-blood human counterpart. Keeping them all together, keeping together what he describes as a “great lattice,” within and around himself, the light: a connection which is immaterial, but emotionally and physically real.</p>
<p>Sensations and emotions are the part of the past he is still reaching out for:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place in another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find…the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth… (204)</p>
<p>But one of his ties with the past is hardly conducive to hope: “the Acrid inferences would not let up” (ibid.), confirming that his fate lies in his present state; he can’t go home again: “He had to see his being only as it was now” (143).</p>
<p>And the way he is now is determined by those unknown forces who try to keep him under control, for unstated (given the origin of cyborg speculations, we have to ask, military?) purposes. Knowing, growing, search for origins, self-determination, all are mediated and shaped in the proud construction of language right at the moment in which deconstruction (or <span class="lightEmphasis">un</span> construction) appears triumphant. Self-diminishment, like Bartleby’s anorexia, could be a way of imposing one’s own vanishing self as a felt absence. And yet <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is all about the recreation of a <span class="lightEmphasis">presence</span>: not (as in Ihab Hassan’s <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus</span>) a literature of silence, but a literature <span class="lightEmphasis">out</span> of silence and speechlessness (in a confrontation with “Voices”): a will to remaking when the unmaking process is spreading everywhere.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in other words, reinterprets its acknowledged sources, Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> and the history of Moon flights (especially Apollo 13) as parables of impossibility of control over personal and collective existence, and of endurance and defense of dignity in such a condition of isolation. Space might be a trap, but offers also a dream never to be discarded. And thinking of McElroy’s references to Calvino, we could probably add the <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics’</span> protagonist, Qwfwq, as a source for McElroy’s fascination with weightlessness (a keyword in Calvino, of course) already pointed out by Tony Tanner (Scenes 207-37).</p>
<p>As in the previously quoted passage from Emerson, in both seeing and saying, Imp Plus as well is looking for some kind of permanence. So, the most Beckettian passages in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> are its strongest affirmations of hope: “Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing” (3). And later:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces - he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think - what was it? (118)</p>
<p>Centerless and multiplex, shapeless and manifold (in this, similar to many protagonists of contemporary U.S. fiction, as Tony Tanner argued in <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>), his new identity thrills and scares Imp Plus at the same time:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Him.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it on his mouth and in his breath. <span class="lightEmphasis">Him</span>. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span> in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span>? (114)</p>
<p>The scary part is that any process bears the mark of inherent instability: any growth can become a decline: “He was not just increasing. He could become less” (132). After all, he will never be isolated by the rest of “humanity,” just as he has never been; the threat of the “Concentration Loop” will always accompany him: “Which meant Imp <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> would be in touch with Ground again” (155).</p>
<p>In the end he is forced to consider the alternatives, which he tries to sort out with his new powers (as McElroy writes in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” Imp is “evidently neuro-connected to Ground Control, word-wired, linked electronically, pulse-translatable evidently into communicable sounds - thought-wired?”: a form of telepathy?):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become. (184)</p>
<p>He can cooperate in order to be retrieved, he can run away toward deep space: but then, both these options would mean accepting the patterns of instrumentalization and asocial empowerment the Powers-That-Be hope to incarnate in the cyborg body, whereas Imp Plus wants and needs connection and, above all, communication: “He had to tell all the truth he knew” (201).</p>
<p>The final question from Ground, as he is about to enter the Earth atmosphere toward likely self-destruction, has obvious allegorical undertones: “DO YOU HAVE POWER? ” (214). His self may have been developing, but rather than “transcendence through power” and the “mastery…of the re-creative intellect” (Miller 175, 177), McElroy and his cyborg seem preoccupied with the uncertainty of an alienated interiority, and Imp Plus’ answer is “YES AND NO… <span class="lightEmphasis">No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry</span> ” (214-5).</p>
<p>In concomitantly refusing to act as pure instrument, and to accept the mythologies of individual expansiveness, McElroy’s cyborg satellite restores a role to embodiment. As Tabbi writes, the “body he desires, like any sublime object, is made all the more painfully real to Imp Plus by virtue of its unattainability” (143). The finale of Imp Plus’ story appears to be a heroic sacrifice in the quest for a fulfilling form of literally limited, yet non-alienated self.</p>
<p>Something very solid melts into air in this ending: this is a defeat. And yet, this defeated, powerless science-fictional being ironically incarnates a hope. In Daniele’s interview, McElroy talks about the need for moving away and beyond wholesale rejections of technology, so common among intellectuals, and provocatively evokes Thoreau in connection with <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> (100). And ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” concludes by describing the novel as a science-fictional pastoral idyll. And indeed, skeptical as it is, <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> appears to have been literally an ironic novel about the construction of a garden in the middle of the machine. A postmodern novel about innocence.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Angenot, Marc. “The Absent Paradigm.” <span class="journaltitle">Science-Fiction Studies</span> 6 (1979): 9-19.</p>
<p>Bernal, J. D. <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span>. London: Kegan, 1929.</p>
<p>Brooke-Rose, Christine. <span class="booktitle">A Rhetoric of the Unreal</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.</p>
<p>Cadigan, Pat. <span class="booktitle">Fools</span>. New York: Bantam, 1993.</p>
<p>Carrel, Alexis. <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span>. New York: Harper, 1935.</p>
<p>Daniele, Daniela. “Joseph McElroy: Cervelli in orbita.” <span class="booktitle">Scrittori e finzioni d’America</span>. Ed. Daniela Daniele. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. 97-102.</p>
<p>Dery, Mark. <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century</span>. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.</p>
<p>Emerson, Ralph Waldo. <span class="booktitle">Selected Prose and Poetry</span>. Ed. Reginald L. Cook. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950.</p>
<p>Hadas, Pamela W. “Green Thoughts on Being in Charge: Discovering Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 140-55.</p>
<p>Hassan, Ihab. <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature</span>. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna J. <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1999.</p>
<p>Kline, Nathan S., and Manfred Clynes. “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” <span class="booktitle">Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight</span>. Ed. Bernard E. Flaherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1961. 345-71.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom. <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1989.</p>
<p>–. Introduction. Joseph McElroy. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987. v-x.</p>
<p>–. “Joseph McElroy and the Art of Excess.” <span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span> 21 (1980): 15-37.</p>
<p>– and Larry McCaffery. “Interview with Joseph McElroy.” <span class="booktitle">Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists</span>. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. 235-51.</p>
<p>Materassi, Mario. “The Model of Climactic Ellipsis, or, The Event as Mask.” <span class="booktitle">The Artist and His Masks: William Faulkner’s Metafiction</span>. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. 193-9.</p>
<p>Martin, Terence. <span class="booktitle">Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>. Trans. Mario Marchetti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left To Me</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. 1976. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987.</p>
<p>–. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light.” Unpublished. [Italian ed. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light: Scienza e letteratura.” Trans. Salvatore Proietti. <span class="journaltitle">Lo Straniero</span> 30-31 (2002): 105-114.]</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1987.</p>
<p>Miller, Alicia M. “Power and Perception in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 173-80.</p>
<p>Porush, David. <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1985.</p>
<p>Powers, Richard. <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>. New York: Farrar, 1995.</p>
<p>Proietti, Salvatore. “Bodies, Ghosts, and Global Virtualities: On Gibson and English-Canadian Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Il Canada e le culture della globalizzazione</span>. Ed. Alfredo Rizzardi and Giovanni Dotoli. Fasano, Italy: Schena, 2001. 479-94.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Cyborg, Cyberspace, and North American Science Fiction</span>. Ph.D. diss., McGill U, 1998.</p>
<p>–. “The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and U.S. Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers</span>. Ed. Karen Sayer and John Moore. London: Macmillan and New York: St.Martin’s P, 2000. 116-26.</p>
<p>Suvin, Darko. <span class="booktitle">Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction</span>. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1988.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk</span>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.</p>
<p>Tanner, Tony. <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>. London: Cape, 1971.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Scenes of Nature, Signs of Man</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.</p>
<p>Wilson, Rob. “Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime.” <span class="journaltitle">Boundary</span> 2 19 (1992): 205-29.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/salvatore-proietti">Salvatore Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/proietti">Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/levi">levi</a>, <a href="/tags/bakhtin">bakhtin</a>, <a href="/tags/toffler">toffler</a>, <a href="/tags/chomsky">Chomsky</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/wilson">wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/calvino">calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/ballard">ballard</a>, <a href="/tags/clarke">clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/hjortsberg">Hjortsberg</a>, <a href="/tags/vonnegut">vonnegut</a>, <a href="/tags/no">No</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1093 at http://electronicbookreview.comFront to the Future: Joseph McElroy's Ancient Historyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/centrifugal
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Ian Demsky</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-05</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Ancient History: a paraphase</span> is a novel of points, distances, and measurements. “It is open-ended like a circle that’s only a moving point whose centrifugal trail fades behind it,” as the main character, Cyrus, writes to the recently suicided intellectual, Dom, after breaking into his apartment (6-7). Through this letter, which will never be read by its intended audience, Cyrus triangulates the distance between himself and the deceased Dom with reference points in their overlapping histories. Two points make a line, but it takes three to map a plane - and many overlapping planes to constitute a field. [ <span class="lightEmphasis">link to <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/all-over">William Smith Wilson</a> on McElroy’s “field novel” - eds.</span> ]</p>
<p>Characteristic of McElroy’s work, the individuals in the novel exist within fields of “coordinate equality,” an acknowledgment that our cultural and personal shapes and patterns are consciously hewn from and imposed upon the impersonal and alien equidistance of Things. Could it be a coincidence that the father of Cy’s friend Al, with whom he spent boyhood summers in the country, ultimately ceded to him the connect-the-dots puzzle in the <span class="lightEmphasis">Heatsburg Hour</span> newspaper? “The immediate case was the carelessly executed - or anyway sloppily dotted - picture whose solution I didn’t really see how I’d known…” (61). Cy explores (on Dom’s paper, with Dom’s pen) his potential role in the McLuhan/Mailer figure’s demise, to which he may have contributed by stealing letters from Dom’s family from the mailbox in their shared apartment building. He plots the points for (A)l, (B)ob, (C)yrus, (D)om, (E)v, his wife, and (E)mma, their daughter, (F)red Eagle, the librarian, (G)ail (or (A)bigail, Al’s sister), etc. The lines he draws between them are his attempt to puzzle things out.</p>
<p>Cy can only know his position by knowing the distances between other points, such as his childhood friends Al and Bob, whom he has never allowed to meet. “If I kept them apart thinking they wouldn’t hit it off, I kept close to you Dom” (141). Cy quickly realizes that his mathematic is not stable when used to measure the tenuous phlebography of human lives. “If the points and lines would only stand still my parabolic arc would be fine,” he writes. “But how can you stay equidistant from something that’s cut itself loose from the foreseeable future?” (155).</p>
<p>As Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty states: The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known. This is the problem with trying to be an outside observer of one’s own life: to know where one is, is to lose sight of where one is going. As in the case of the centrifugal circle, if you fix the point, you lose the shape the circle makes with its motion; and if you try to see the circle, the point disappears. Or, as Cy writes, “to wholly grasp it would be to wrongly fix it” (142). It is the interpenetration of fields, of characters in the phases of their “ancient histories,” that allows the reader to grasp at the connection between Dom’s leap from a window during a student protest and Bob’s leap, years earlier, from a study hall classroom. All points in past time and space become equal, without hierarchy or emphasis, until they are woven into a personal web. “No neat ushering from present to past,” Cy writes. “[I]t’s all equal” (33).</p>
<p>Here the reader must allow me to interrupt myself, just as <span class="booktitle">Ancient History</span> is interrupted when visitors to the apartment take away Cyrus’ first pages while he hides behind a curtain. Perhaps I am following Dom’s Code of Welcomed Interruption, which “sprang from [his] sense that our state is now a Field-State of InterPoly force Vectors multimplicitly plodding toward Coordinate Availability and away from the hierarchical subordinations of the old tour-de-force antropols…” (141).</p>
<p>For a long time, I had difficulty articulating what it was about McElroy’s writing that I found so captivating, so <span class="lightEmphasis">important</span>. I found some help in an unlikely place: the introductory note to the second book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, <span class="booktitle">Balthazar</span>. “Modern literature offers us no Unities,” Durrell wrote in 1957, “so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition” (9). Durrell’s desire was to bring the world of literature into sync with a universe freshly minted by modern scientific understanding. “It would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call ‘classical’ - for our time. Even if the results proved to be a ‘science-fiction’ in the true sense” (9). It was not the content of literature Durrell sought to reform, but its structure on the deepest levels.</p>
<p>This is McElroy’s gift. He has given us a new, classical form, one that is more attuned to our present understanding of the world, which grows ever more uncertain, distant, and mysterious, even as the veils shrouding it continue to be lifted by scientific exploration.</p>
<p>Interrupting my interruption -<br />
As the story develops, as the interconnections in the histories of Al, Bob, Cy, and Dom are fleshed out, we can see that the individuals themselves become more distant. Going back to our centrifugal circle, because it is impossible to see the point and the circle at once, one must shift perspectives continually to have any sense of the multiplicity of the whole. To shift between a view of the whole (circle) and the specific (point), one may need to increase or decrease the intervening distance. The observer - the reader - will have to accept a state of motion and uncertainty.</p>
<p>“All confessions are fantastically banal - even how I may have mildly affected your end,” Cy writes to Dom. But these so-called banalities (butterflies flapping their wings in Burma), which range from Cy’s stolen Junior Corona typewriter to Bob’s pinkeye on Al’s 12th birthday that kept them from meeting, must be taken in their relationship to the greater field (where typhoons may develop). Each of these events must be measured against others to be understood.</p>
<p>“Dom, if you can hear me, have you ever thought that maybe you’re simply a subconscious and that you belong to some unknown person far around you? Or in that unknown being a small central empty space?” (56). These questions from Cy take us to the heart of our engagement with the novel. The story, in book form, exists as a potentiality, coming alive only and existing only in the distances between all its unknown and far-flung readers. But isn’t that why we read in the first place, to interrupt our lives, to better measure the distances between the world and us, to plot ourselves in the greater field?</p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Durrell, Lawrence. <span class="booktitle">Balthazar</span> (1961). New York: Penguin Books, 1991.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Ancient History: A Paraphase</span>. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ian-demsky">ian demsky</a>, <a href="/tags/demsky">demsky</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/field">field</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/mailer">Mailer</a>, <a href="/tags/heisenberg">Heisenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/uncertainty-principle">uncertainty principle</a>, <a href="/tags/lawrence-durrell">Lawrence Durrell</a>, <a href="/tags/alexandria-quartet">Alexandria Quartet</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1087 at http://electronicbookreview.comA Remediation's Remediation?http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/designflaw
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jan Baetens</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-02-22</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span> (Bolter and Grusin 1999) proposed a theory on media evolution that attempted to break with the myth of the newness of new media and the linear supersession of older media by newer ones (their main target, although this is not the explicit program of the book, is definitely Marshall McLuhan, whose teleological <span class="booktitle">Understanding New Media</span> is clearly meant to be remediated by a more nuanced and more powerful theory). Coining the notion of Remediation, they argued that each new media refashioned at least one older medium. This process of refashioning, however, does not obey a single strategy: if the basic aim of each Remediation seems to be the increase of realism, this call for immediate transparency does not suffice to explain the whole picture. For Bolter and Grusin, a second strategy has to be taken into account, namely the need to foreground the new medium itself, which gives its user a more vivid experience than the older one. Media history and intermedia relationships are therefore the result of these two interacting strategies and forces, which should never be separated if the Remediation’s goal is to be successful, i.e. to become the new (although always provisory) standard in the field.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is without any doubt a seductive book, and it has seduced many readers, although not everybody felt happy with the all-encompassing and rather decontextualized sesam-like theory of transparency/hypermediacy (see Kirshenbaum’s 1999 <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/archival">review</a> of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> and the accompanying <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/Adornian">Riposte</a> by Baetens).</p>
<p>I apologize for this long introduction to a review of Bolter’s new book (written in collaboration with Diane Gromala, chair of the SIGGRAPH 2000 Art Committee and curator of the art gallery of this “fair”), but such an introduction is exactly what the authors claim <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> to provide. There is of course an introduction, and even a whole set of them (as if the absence was contagious!), but these pages are in a sense “self-destructive.” They explain that the book has in view a very particular readership (it aims toward the community of graphic designers, not that of other readers, those for instance interested in media theory), adding that there will be thus no comments on the theoretical background of this mostly hands-on project:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Finally, we acknowledge the work of the following critics and theorists. Readers (and especially reviewers of our book) all have their favorites and are likely to complain that we are ignorant of this or that key idea. We are no doubt ignorant of many important ideas, but we are acquainted with the contributions of the theorists and theories listed below. We choose not to discuss them, because this is a book about the craft of and the material engagement with digital art and design, and we believe that the theoretical literature often strays too far from practice to be useful for our purposes:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Richard Dawkins and memes<br />
Deleuze and Guattari and rhizomes<br />
Donna Haraway and cyborgs<br />
Heidegger and enframing<br />
The Frankfurt School and the culture industry<br />
Lacan and the mirror stage<br />
Baudrillard and simulacra</p>
<p class="longQuotation">(x-xi)</p>
<p>(The reader will notice that there is no final point at the end of this enumeration).</p>
<p>This double exclusion (of a certain type of reader on the one hand and of a certain type of discourse on the other) is the more strange since <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> is deeply rooted in the theoretical stances of two authors whose name and work is lacking in the list above (and even in the bibliography and the index!): Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, whose <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is clearly “applied” in this book by Bolter and Gromala. The double metaphor of “window” and “mirror” and its double definition as “looking through (the medium) and “looking at (the medium”) are manifest transcodings of the concepts of “transparency” (realism) and “hypermediacy” (experience). First, an application of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is made to a very specific field, that of graphic design (although some odd things happen here: in fact, the book is on digital art, but this field is considered the quintessence of what graphic design should be and signify today, a wonderful theoretical coup d’état that is nowhere fully motivated). Second, an application is made to the book, i.e. <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span>, itself. <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> was certainly an attractively printed and cleverly illustrated book, and it surely made some attempts to take the digital revolution into account, for instance by inventing a kind of hypertextual variant of the traditional footnote, but these attempts remained rather elementary: readers of <span class="booktitle">SMLXL</span> (Koolhaas 1995) must have found <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> very old-fashioned).</p>
<p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">See also <a class="internal" href="/imagenarrative/writingspace">Anne Burdick’s review</a> of Bolter’s <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> for further discussion of designwriting, eds.</span> ]</p>
<p>A reader with bad faith could say that <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> is nothing more than a quickly made spin-off of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>, well served by the wonderful merchandising machine that is MIT. A pretty spin-off and a good-looking one, but nevertheless also a disappointing one. Indeed, despite its fascinating examples, its clear and well-written historical and theoretical enframings, many things go wrong in this book.</p>
<p>One may regret for instance that the global theory of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> is not even presented: it is taken for granted that this theory exists, that everybody knows and accept it, and that is does not need any further analysis (in short: as if it had become perfect common knowledge or, to stay in the Barthesian terminology of Bolter and Gromala, a <span class="lightEmphasis">myth</span>; if one were a follower of Charles Sander Peirce, one might say the Remediation theory functions as an unquestioned and unchallengeable “final interpretant,” beyond any doubt, and even beyond the very consciousness). This is of course very dangerous, since it brings the authors to adopt a pretty doxological tone. Every ten pages (say, at the end of each chapter) we are reminded of the Universal Truth of graphic design, with all the DOs and DON’Ts that this position entails. One example among many others:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Good design does not mold users according to its recipe; instead, it allows users to see themselves (and the process and contexts of design) in the interface. An effective interface functions as a mirror as well as a window. (74)</p>
<p>The rephrasing of <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span>, as all readers of this book will observe immediately is utterly transparent. Yet the veracity of all these truths is relative: it depends on many factors, whose role is not always fully incorporated in the book. If the thesis “an effective interface functions as a mirror as well as a window” is true (and why not?), it is not because the authors have been giving arguments for this claim, but because they manage to demonstrate the falseness of what they consider the opposite claim, namely the idea that good graphic design is transparent design (Bolter and Grusin seem to have a particular dislike of Nielsen [2000] and Norman [1998]). But the fact that a theory “X” proves to be wrong does not imply at all that the opposite theory is rightjo (though this is exactly the stance that Bolter and Gromala are taking throughout the whole book).</p>
<p>Moreover, the opposition of transparency/hypermediacy (in the metaphoric terminology of Bolter and Gromala this becomes: mirror/window) remains unclear. It is not clear whether the mirror-like stance of “reflectivity” (in <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> there is no room any longer for the concept of “hypermediacy”) and experience represent something good <span class="lightEmphasis">in itself</span> or not. In other words: do Bolter and Gromala make a plea for the triad mirror/reflectivity/experience as such or do they defend a kind of middle-of-the-road combination of transparency on the one hand and reflectivity on the other? In the beginning of <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span>, one has the strong impression that Bolter and Gromala defend strongly the side of the “mirror” as a necessary antithesis to the unsuccessful transparency thesis. Yet the more one advances in the book, the more one notices that the important thing for Bolter and Gromala is not the <span class="lightEmphasis">antithetical</span> relationship of windows and mirrors; instead what counts is their peaceful and ecumenical <span class="lightEmphasis">synthesis</span>. From a theoretical point of view, of course, this makes a world of difference. Indeed, if the aim of the book is to remediate graphic design by proposing, thanks to the examples given by contemporary digital art, a blending of transparency and reflectivity, this has a crucial consequence for the position of the reflectivity pole, which then ceases to be the “good guy” in the eternal battle between right and wrong (I’m sorry for this language, partly inspired by Bolter’s and Gromala’s love of parables). If what matters is the good balance between both sides, then one might argue that the problem of graphic design is as much that of the “mirror” than it is of the “window.” In other words: if it is true that we need more reflectivity in order to compensate for the errors of transparency, it is no less true that we also need more transparency to counterbalance the imperfections of reflectivity. Unfortunately, this is not the logical stance taken by Bolter and Gromala, who are obnubilated by their will to debunk the position of people like Nielsen and Norman (and, more curiously, Tschichold, the ultimate modern representative of the despised transparency myth).</p>
<p>This major theoretical flaw of <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> does not of course prevent the reader from discovering many interesting presentations and analyses of digital art. Even the fact that the works presented do not cover the whole field (readers looking for a good general introduction will be better off with Lunenfeld [2000]), but rather more resemble extracts of the SIGGRAPH 2000 catalogue, is not annoying. The works themselves are generally fascinating. The readings proposed by the authors and their theoretical and historical framing are without exception illuminating. And the systematic “lesson” Bolter and Gromala draw from their interpretations (“there’s nothing like a good mix of transparency and reflectivity, and it works!, as we saw it, not on television but at SIGGRAPH 2000”) has many convincing aspects. What is actually lacking, however, is what is announced in the very blurb of the book: the application of digital art to graphic design. It does not suffice to postulate that digital art shows what graphic design is or should be today, one should also be able to produce actual examples of digital graphic design. In this respect, <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> is doubly disappointing.</p>
<p>It is disappointing, first, because the examples given are not analyzed but simply enumerated. After eight chapters giving a detailed analysis of eight works of the SIGGRAPH fair (including the display of the works in the art gallery itself), <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> dedicates one short chapter to examples of digital graphic design, but it does nothing more than list names and titles, without any further analysis.</p>
<p>Second, the authors claim their book to be an <span class="foreignWord">ars poetica</span>, i.e. a performance in practice of what it proposes in theory: “…we have tried to produce this book according to the principle that we have been preaching: to make it an experience that is both transparent and reflective” (164). The reader of <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span> will not be convinced by this final revelation, since the overall lay-out of the book is very academic and even dull (one can only regret Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s mind-broadening psychedelic experiments of the 60s, not to speak of the more recent explorations of some printed no-man’s-land by Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas). In this respect the final halleluhia surrounding the digitally remediated typeface “Excretia” makes things only worse. Excretia is a “morphing” typeface that changes following the writer’s bodily states:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The writer is hooked up to a biofeedback device, which measures her heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response. As she writes, these continuous streams of data affect the visual character of the typeface. The words “throb” as her hearts beats; they grow tendrils and spikes if she becomes “excitable.” As the writer works, the text she has already written may continue to change, or she may choose to freeze it to reflect her state at the very instant of the writing - in effect, to create a biological-typographical record. The same word may have a very different feel, texture, and therefore meaning at different times… With Excretia, a word processor is no longer simply a productivity tool but a reflective experience in itself. (166)</p>
<p>What is needed here is a strong skeptical response. Not only does the reader not necessarily care for these effects (one should never forget what good old Flaubert said: “Art has nothing to do with the artist” - but everything to do with the work and its impact on the audience). But what Bolter and Gromala are doing in their book has nothing to do with their claims on remediated typography. Actually, their new typeface Excretia does not play any serious part in the design of <span class="booktitle">Windows and Mirrors</span>. The fact that it is incorporated in the typographical form of the title of the chapter does not mean anything for the global design of the book (it is the usual error of typeface designers who make a confusion between typeface and design, between the part and the whole). In order to prove successful, the new typeface should have been used throughout the whole work (and not only as a kind of decorative element at the mere level of the title, where one often finds typographical “figures of speech”) and it should have been incorporated at the level of the page lay-out (and it is impossible to discover any influence or Remediation whatsoever at this page level, contrary to other recent books by MIT such as Hayles (2002) [see Baetens 2003]). All this is definitely not the case, and for very good reasons. A more systematic use of Excretia would have increased dramatically the book’s reflectivity, which is clearly <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> what the authors want to accomplish: what they have in mind is the transparent communication of a simple message; what they want to give is a “window” on the “mirror,” <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> the opposite, and not even a blending of both.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Jan BAETENS (2000). “A Critique of Cyberhybrid-hype,” in Jan Baetens and José Lambert (eds), <span class="booktitle">The Future of Cultural Studies</span>. Leuven: Leuven UP, 153-171.</p>
<p>Jan BAETENS (2003). “The Book as Technotext: Katherine Hayles’s Digital Materialism,” in <a class="outbound" href="http://www.imageandnarrative.be/mediumtheory/janbaetens.htm"><span class="journaltitle">Image and Narrative</span></a> , 7. n.p.</p>
<p>Jay David BOLTER and Richard GRUSIN (1999). <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.</p>
<p>Katherine HAYLES (2002). <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.</p>
<p>Matt KIRSCHENBAUM (1999), <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/archival">Media, Genealogy, History</a>, in <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>.</p>
<p>Rem KOOLHAAS (1995) <span class="booktitle">S.M.L.XL: O.M.A</span>. Rotterdam: 010.</p>
<p>Peter LUNENFELD (2000). <span class="booktitle">Snap to Grid. A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.</p>
<p>Jakob NIELSEN (2000). <span class="booktitle">Designing Web Usability</span>. Indianapolis: New Riders.</p>
<p>Donald NORMAN (1998). <span class="booktitle">The Invisible computer</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jan-baetens">jan baetens</a>, <a href="/tags/baetens">baetens</a>, <a href="/tags/bolter">bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/grusin">grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/gromala">gromala</a>, <a href="/tags/web-design">web design</a>, <a href="/tags/remediation">remediation</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/transparency">transparency</a>, <a href="/tags/immersion">immersion</a>, <a href="/tags/hypermediacy">hypermediacy</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator996 at http://electronicbookreview.comsokal text: another funny thing happened on the way to the forumhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/polylogical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joe Amato</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>why the hell is there a national controversy over at <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>?… how might it have been defused, if not avoided?… in what follows, i’d like to work through some of the ins and outs of this ongoing debate, in the process advocating a more fully dialogic use of electronic fora… for those who missed the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> brouhaha as it unfolded: a physicist, one alan sokal, publishes a piece entitled “transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,” in the spring/summer 1996 special issue of the magazine <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>, an issue devoted to the so-called “science wars”… now, in most academic circles, <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> enjoys a fairly esteemed rep., published as it is by duke u p under the co-editorial leadership of none other than andrew ross and bruce robbins… anyway, subsequent to publication, sokal writes in the may/june issue of <span class="journaltitle">lingua franca</span> that he has published his piece in order to answer the following (loaded) question: “would a leading journal of cultural studies publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”… sokal, a self-professed “leftist,” has evidently been incited to his prank after confirming on his own the legitimacy of claims made by paul gross and norman levitt in their 1994 book, <span class="booktitle">higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science</span> - a book that presumes to take on the evils of postmodernism, cultural studies, and the like…</p>
<p>after sokal’s revelation, ross himself composes a rather detailed electronic defense of the editorial policies leading to the publication of sokal’s piece (ross’s defense makes its way to poetics via list member steven shoemaker’s decision to forward same, steve’s tag line quoting courtney love’s “i fake it so real i am beyond fake”)… which details are later denied in at least one substantive way by sokal (in a rejoinder sokal distributed electronically after the <span class="journaltitle">ny times</span> apparently refused to print it because of its length): ross claims that sokal was “resistant” to any “general revisions” of the sort <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> recommended, while sokal claims that he asked repeatedly for “substantive comments, suggestions and criticisms,” but never received any (thanks to aldon lynn nielsen for pointing this out - on poetics)… anyway, here’s the core of ross’s response:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">in sum, sokal’s assumption that his “parody” struck a disreputable chord with the woozy editors of social text is ill-conceived. indeed, its status as parody does not alter substantially our initial perception of, and our interest in, the piece itself as a curio, or symptomatic document. of course, the whole affair may say something about our own conception of how physicists read philosophy, but that seems less important to us than that his prank does not simply lead to a heightening of the hysteria which the science wars have induced.</p>
<p>ross’s response is followed by a longish op-ed piece in the 21 may <span class="journaltitle">ny times</span>, “professor sokal’s bad joke,” by none other than stanley fish, head honcho of duke u p and a professor of english and law at duke… in his piece, fish claims that sokal is culpable on the count of “two misunderstandings”: first, that sokal “takes ‘socially constructed’ to mean ‘not real’ ”; and second, having not properly understood those sociologists who advocate science-as-socially-constructed-practice, sokal “thinks that the sociology of science is in competition with mainstream science” (fish elucidates all of this via the analogy of baseball, a lý stephen jay gould - an antic that, in this case, only muddies matters further)… hence fish concludes that sokal, because of his inadequate understanding of sociology as a “research project,” has managed a “deception” that “threatens to undermine the intellectual standards he vows to protect”…</p>
<p>well, let’s see if i understand fish correctly: sokal has not correctly grasped sociology of science, ergo he has through his paper unwittingly undermined professional-intellectual standards… but here fish is culpable on the count of two misrepresentations: first, sociologists of science themselves continue to have profound disagreements over the status of social constructivism, known in shorthand as socon… for example, warren schmaus, ullica segerstrale and douglas jesseph, in the journal <span class="journaltitle">social epistemology</span> (“a manifesto”; 1992, vol. 6, no. 3) refute what they (with tongues-in-cheek) refer to as “the soft program” of socon, which includes socon in the “strong sense,” on the grounds that, in this latter, “the cognitive commitments of scientists are either denied or treated as irrelevant” (243; and i’m not taking sides here)… so sokal is at least not wrong in having presumed residual (if somewhat mitigated) controversies over socon-based research… fish’s second misrepresentation has to do with the status of sokal’s “hoax” itself: fish suggests fraud and impropriety on sokal’s part, even as he attributes a certain ignorance of epistemology to sokal’s paper… but if sokal has *incorrectly* grasped a field of inquiry, how could his “hoax” possibly produce fish’s “corrosive effects”?… fish himself argues that sociology of science poses no “threat” to science, that the “integrity” of a research enterprise will not come from “presumptuous outsiders” but from “insiders who decide not to play by the rules or to put the rules in the service of a devious purpose”… yet sokal is *not* an insider - he’s clearly an outsider… what’s missing here is any substantive discussion of *why* the formal maneuvers sokal deployed in his “parody” made it past the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> editorial board… if the research conventions of a given field of inquiry are so transparent as to permit such deception to take place, then at the very least we need to take a long hard [wink] look at those conventions…</p>
<p>now before any of my readers get the wrong idea about me or my position on such matters, let me cut and paste from a few of my initial posts to poetics:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">i think mebbe ross oughtta just cop to it, and admit that sokal’s prank got past the editorial board…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">nevertheless, i find mself on the ross side of things in terms of challenging sokal’s “leftist” motives, and in terms of what sort of work i find valuable, even as, again, i do think that sokal managed to put one over on <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>, all naysaying to the contrary…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">why is it that this controversy, at least as it’s coming down the pike, is taking place over there, in print?… at least among the contenders, i mean - ross, fish, sokal, etc?… why the hell don’t we have an electronic forum where sokal, ross, fish and anybody else who’s interested can converge to chew over these… discrepancies?…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">a lot of the hogwash that’s likely to emerge from this controversy could probably be addressed and dispensed with in just a few email exchanges… which, of course, is hardly to argue for progress, but which is to make a claim for process, due and otherwise…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">so those who choose to explore the interconnections among (?) these domains are bound to find themselves in mixed company, so to speak… it’s fraught terrain, punctuated by territorial struggles and anxieties… and practical jokes (like sokal’s) aside, there’s a certain need, as i see it, to try to speak in ways that promote dialogue, not division…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">still, i’m ultimately on ross’s side on this, if i’ve gotta choose sides, i mean… i don’t think he’s been disingenuous, i think rather he’s merely saturated with his subject position, and is seeping here and there…</p>
<p>ysee, on poetics i have the benefit of a number of other thinkers and writers (400 or so subscribers at the moment) to help me hone my own thinking, as well as to kick around these issues w/o any of us necessarily digging in… here are some particularly trenchant observations by rob wilson, advisory editor at <span class="journaltitle">boundary2</span> (another duke journal):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">shaking the foundations of professional expertise at and around s[ocial]t[ext], sokal is now accused of having written a sophomoric ‘fraud’ and having violated the very professional ethics and professional decorums that sustain such expertise knowledge communities (stanley fish, predictably, in his op-ed take-out so-called sokal piece); but what the nyu professor of physics has actually written is not so much ‘fraud’ as a parodic miming of the pomo cult codes (some of his footnotes are pretty hilarious) and a sending up of an over-extended ‘culturalism’ colonizing domains of reality/history/material production and reproduction where it may just fall apart or become wishy-washy and inadequate.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">that st editors ex post facto can now claim (via a[ndrew] r[oss] on www) that they knew all along it was a ‘sophomoric’ piece of cultural studies by a naive scientist; that st is never ‘refereed’ (what is the in-house critical collective but a set of primary discrimination makers of the in/out, enacting [sure, informally] the rules for what passes as any “social text” text?); and that the sokal essay was going to be dropped from the expanded book edition at duke u p (this would be an unusual post facto decision to make, as duke u p usally runs all the essays and whatever else the editors choose to add from its journals’ “special issues,” within space limits of course), sounds like more critical two-step shuffle to me: why not admit to having been deceived and work from the insights and struggles of that moment? sure, it’s a postmodern black hole now: that a pro-sandinista physicist can be embraced as an ally by rush limbaugh on right-wing talk radio and be stimulated by the “higher superstition” faction of anti-pc-construction science to write such a piece just plays into the spectacle of media reductions - some at b[oundary]2 have suggested this will only drive up the subscription lists of st and generate more cultural capital and “science war” discourse for the players (if they don’t fall or leap from nyu windows and fall upward, “deconstructing postmodern gravity, slyly”) and the press.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">but sokal has, I think, caught ross and the st “star wars” discourse apparatus in an over-extension of their ‘culturalism,’ miming the codes in devious simulacrous ways that reflect and refract where the journal is philosophically at. as somebody has said, under such pressure, the “subject position” is oozing into “position(s).”</p>
<p>more might be added here about ross’s gloss on the institutional site of his journal - “social text has always seen its lineage in the ‘little review’ tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic domain”… but when all is said and done, after having read many if not all of the related documents, it’s evident to me that this latter controversy, fraught as it appears to be with ulterior motives, might have been attended to in a public forum that does not itself feed, directly, the mainstream news tendency to ostracize intellectual-eggheads (that’s me too), to capitalize on the anti-intellectual leanings of mainstream public life in the u.s… and that this might itself have mitigated, if not avoided, a public dispute that exacerbates the academic in-fighting scene and magnifies, in the mainstream public eye, the irrelevance of (for one) humanities scholarship… which in turn feeds the current corporate-vocationalizing pressures on academe, however indirectly (and on my tech. campus, it’s not all that indirect)…</p>
<p>and OK: i’d rather that our articulate proponents on the left hadn’t left behind me and a host of others sympathetic (and unsympathetic) to more liberatory agenda by conducting their disputes in more mainstream print fora, fora that few of us have access to…</p>
<p>my reading of the sokal text debacle - as i posted to the poetics list in response to rob wilson’s fine insights - was that all parties had been insufficiently *literary*, finally… that the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> editorial board might have seen sokal’s parody for what it was, not simply as a “curio” (ross)… that sokal might not have mistaken his intentions, or the resulting generic form said intentions took (parody, or satire - and there is a difference), as a somehow intrinsically-discounted contribution to knowledge-as-we-know-it (the piece may in fact have some residual, say, metaphorical value, however much bullshit is “in” it - but i won’t belabor this latter point here)… and that this itself suggests that we attend to our discourses, to our writing and reading practices, with a better understanding of the various writing and reading publics ‘out there’… not that attending to the literary as such gets us “out” of our various institutional predicaments, as rob himself was quick to point out - online…</p>
<p>though i’ve never been entirely happy with mcluhan’s distinction between hot (user-passive) and cold (user-interactive) media, he *did* happen to mention, in his characteristically sage way, that one “vantage point from which to test the difference between hot and cold media is the practical joke”… and this may be just the point at which my invocation of the “literary” falters (that is, unless i modify it some): so many critics and theorists of culture and literature just may not get it, they may not quite see their own investment in the literary values of a bygone era, much as interrogations of canonicity can often obscure same old same old exercises in discursive preciosity - talking the same old ways to the same old crowds… for mcluhan, the “hot literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke” (<span class="booktitle">understanding media</span> 32)… mcluhan isn’t saying that such jokes don’t exist, but simply that literary-inclined folks generally find them “distasteful”… but by “literary” mcluhan means immersion in print literacy, typography and the like…</p>
<p>one nice thing about the emergence of electronic media, for those so-inclined, is that such media tend to render the forms, contents and motivations of print practice much less transparent, thereby auguring a more informed and inclusive understanding of the literary as a varying site of literacy… perhaps this development itself might encourage a certain sense of disciplinary humor, a capacity for not taking one’s professional Self too seriously, however serious or passionate one may be about one’s work… but we’ll have to tune our wits in, too, to the very real possibility of online news forgeries and the like… after experiencing numerous rounds of virus gags (the perennial “good times” virus comes immediately to mind), i think myself more savvy, and less vulnerable, to pranks and tomfoolery… but who am i kidding? - i’m just a bit more aware of how easy it is to be fooled when one’s critical/creative faculties are stuck in the holding pattern of publication (*this* holding pattern)…</p>
<p>this is not exactly what you’d call news, and andrew ross, for one, knows it… he’s written insightfully on “technoculture,” on popular culture and media, on poetry and poetics… but perhaps writing “on” or “about” such stuff prevents him from fully recognizing the distance, and leverage, such prepositions effect… in any case, i wouldn’t want to find myself in the ungainly position of advocating only more performative media forms, esp. not these days… it’s just that we need an enhanced awareness of a wider range of practices…</p>
<p>so, as to publishing policies: it’s not a matter of winnowing submissions more methodically… it’s more a matter of understanding the broad range of possibilities available for sustained discussion and exchange… from a teaching point of view (and i am a teacher), it’s imperative that educational systems teach critical reading, writing and thinking less as a function of skills acquisition and more as a matter of helping students to engage with the incredible variety of reading and writing communities present in this country and around the globe (and when i write “reading and writing,” i mean to refer to symbolic practices in general)… and again, though online technologies represent the techno-triumph of advanced industrialization and should always be viewed with critical prophylaxis in place, they can be helpful here… writing and reading communities often correspond to formally substantive textual orientations, but such communities don’t begin and end there… an identifiable cadre of poets, for example, may be enamored of a diverse range of aesthetic techniques; on the other hand, there are specific aesthetics that at times induce specific artistic groupings… the point is to increase as well as expand upon current conceptions of literacy, to recognize a much wider array of aesthetic possibilities, discursive possibilities, *social* possibilities than are generally given press in the various press outlets… for example, i mentioned online that -</p>
<p>there is a journal - as i recall the title, <span class="journaltitle">the journal of irreproducible results</span> - that provides a forum for mock-scientific studies of mock phenomena, playing specifically off of *scientific* jargon and methodology, and playing specifically to scientists and the scientifically-inclined… i mention this by way of indicating that sokal’s parody has precedent within scientific discourse communities… if what sokal did is, as ross calls it, a “boy stunt,” it is also connected with the general ethos of scientific discourse, if only on this latter’s (lunatic?) fringes… an ethos emerging from a long history of proving, disproving, and, on occasion, offering up false proofs as a challenge, or for a few laughs - whatever the residual positivism or, as some would have it, male-adolescent leanings…</p>
<p>so what i have to say goes for academia and academics as well… antagonisms of left and right (and shall i declare, like the rest, my leftist leanings?) are not about to go away, nor am i suggesting, again, that online spaces will necessarily allay tensions owing to same… i for one intend to remain adamantly opposed to specific conservative agenda, regardless the medium… but -</p>
<p>let’s take the <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> effort specifically: rather than “focus” an “issue” on a “piece” (albeit originally a talk given) by michael bÈrubÈ (or anybody else), why not set up, instead, an interview forum whereby the <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> editorial staff holds a one week long list-exchange between michael and any number of invited participants?… in fact this could be a wholly open affair - it’s not necessarily the case that a cast of thousands will show up to participate, and in any case the list itself may be moderated… the forum could begin by focusing on a specific topic, and be permitted to digress from there, as list exchange generally does… most readers will note that this is hardly something new - irc’s, moo’s and the like have been providing synchronous gathering places for years now… the only kinda new thang (at this point) is the rather fuzzy publication aura of this process… can we academics put this sorta thing on our vitae?…</p>
<p>well, why not?… if you think you need to do so, why then do so…</p>
<p>in any case, the result would be an archive-able log of give and take over a set duration… this log might be edited into a summary of various cogent posts… or it might simply be archived as such and presented as “THIS MONTH’S FORUM” (of course, this has precedent in print media)… readers of <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> might be encouraged to post commentary in response to the forum to <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>, as well as (and this is crucial) to the various participants themselves… all participants should be required to post their email addresses, a stipulation that should ensure online access to all participants from all participants, as well as discourage any participant from treating the list forum as a monologic publication zone (of course there are no guarantees this won’t happen)…</p>
<p>and with a bit more generosity, and a more informed understanding of - or at least concession to - their own place as a print journal in the diverse range of print and electronic fora, the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> folks might have proceeded similarly (to put the burden on the publisher, that is, and not sokal)… and invited sokal, ross, fish, robbins et. al. to participate in precisely such a forum… which latter might have been edited for a subsequent issue of the journal… which result would seem, as well, to satisfy ross’s description of <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> as a non-refereed journal (which assertion raised more than an eyebrow on poetics, incl. my own, because many of us understood the journal to be refereed)… in any case, nothing prevents <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> from opting to accept participation ‘over the transom,’ esp. in an online forum… such online fora may, in fact, be an esp. useful strategy when discourses collide… if only in retrospect, the gradual migration of the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> debate into these regions - ross’s post, sokal’s rejoinder, my essay - suggests as much…</p>
<p>one liability of online space warrants specific elaboration here: as most electronic lists bear witness to, there are many more men than women presently occupying such spaces (albeit more women are logging-on than ever before), and, to hazard an essentialism of sorts, men - we men, most of us - do in fact bring with us our defensive conversational habits and male-territorial urges… but again: no reason not to take this as further impetus for more renowned folks like ross and bÈrubÈ to use their institutional leverage, incl. their insight into gender issues, to help populate these spaces with more women and more women-friendly conversational structures…</p>
<p>running out of breath and winding down to a provisional end: i find the slippage/seepage in ross’s AND bÈrubÈ’s subject positions problematic to the extent that these latter two gents continue to deny their own investment and complicity in maintaining a “position” predicated on privileged institutional status of one sort or another - that is, a complicity of privilege, and one rooted in print publication practices… for bÈrubÈ and ross, little seems to disrupt their apparent critical sobriety, and they go about their business with business-as-usual cool - two visible, if not powerful, spokespersons for the many on the left… but hey, guess what? - I’M NOT, uhm, COOL, anymore than i’m hooked on phonics, however hot and/or cold the medium… if what we homo sapiens are about is finding ways to engage in more open and candid exchange, with the objective of reducing oppressive, discriminating, normative practices, then we can ill-afford the orthodox stance of speaking only to those who have ears for us… sure, allowance must be made for dissonant articulations (sometimes i’d rather not be understood, really, so much as *felt*) and for complex communities (which latter are likely to persevere underground in any case)… “to publish” means to go public, yes, but one can go public w/o exactly publishing… and as just about anybody who’s spent any time at all in the online world will tell you, it’s not necessary to enter an electronic list and say things for once and for all, as though your professional life depended on it… to be willing to mix it up some, to be willing to listen to grad. students and undergrad. students, academics and non-academics, folks who may not publish all that much but who nonetheless may have a helluva lot to add to the discussion, and whose experience may differ greatly from one’s own - this is the best of the online world… as to the effect online lists can have on print publishing venues, and vice versa - as well as questions pertaining to the serious social and cultural work, even in a more hybrid print-electronic era, encompassed by the qualifier *literary* - these latter are open to anybody’s speculation - anybody, that is, reading along these lines…</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/joe-amato">joe amato</a>, <a href="/tags/andrew-ross">andrew ross</a>, <a href="/tags/alan-sokal">alan sokal</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-communit">electronic communit</a>, <a href="/tags/stanley-fish">stanley fish</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-berube">michael berube</a>, <a href="/tags/social-construct">social construct</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/science-wars">science wars</a>, <a href="/tags/parody">parody</a>, <a href="/tags/cultural-studies">cultural studies</a>, <a href="/tags/warren-schmaus">warren schmaus</a>, <a href="/tags/ullica-segerstrale">ullica segerstrale</a>, <a href="/tags/douglas-jesseph">douglas jesseph</a>, <a href="/tags/rob-wilson">rob wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/rush-limbaugh">Rush Limbaugh</a>, <a href="/tags/technoculture">technoculture</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator922 at http://electronicbookreview.comNotes From the Digital Overgroundhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/alternatively
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Mark Amerika</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1995-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1</h2>
<p class="epigraph">It’s disturbing enough that man shits. Even that’s an act of enemy behavior.<br />
-Heiner Muller</p>
<p>Up until the publication of my first novel, <span class="booktitle">The Kafka Chronicles</span> (1993), I had spent the previous 15 years, which comprised the totality of my adult life, as a participant in the underground economy, an economy that is usually associated with criminality, especially as it relates to narco-terrorism, but which for me was part of a personal philosophy grounded in acts of voluntary simplicity or, if you will, a Thoreau-like necessity to distance oneself from the mainstream culture that’s always on the ready to absorb you and/or your ideas for its own inane uses. As Thoreau himself said way before the days of TV, computers, and online networking, “as far as I have heard or observed, the principle object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.”</p>
<p>As someone who based his whole working life and survivalist instincts on the resistance of this vast mechanism of capital formation and image absorption, I felt secure in the knowledge that mine would be a life of poverty and obscurity. The System (as we are so eager to call it) would not do me in because I would not be a part of it. As far as I could tell, I was destined to play the role of economically-disenfranchised underground artist. Publication as a novelist changed all that. With the release of <span class="booktitle">The Kafka Chronicles</span>, my private “underground values” were now being actively disseminated into the public sphere, a sphere whose network of mainstream, literary, computer, and underground media sources helped elevate my so-called novel’s status from unrecognized work to cult-hit. This unexpected “windfall” of attention was soon giving me an “opportunity” to “come out of my shell” so that I, too, could start networking my way into the general mix of late-capitalist life and its ever-increasing addiction to all things technological and mediatic.</p>
<p>Being published was, all of a sudden, an invitation to Being Digital (to borrow the term from the best-selling book on electronic culture by Nicholas Negroponte). [ <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/monstrous">link to Timothy Luke’s review</a> of <span class="booktitle">Being Digital</span> ] Yet, Being Digital is Being Networked and Being Networked is the most efficient and clever way of Being Marketed. This is a roundabout way of suggesting that when self-proclaimed underground writers such as myself decide to try and get published, i.e. “to go public,” they immediately call into question everything they have been practicing their entire adult lives. For now they are surely seeking out some kind of public presence so as to better network their wares within the marketplace of ideas and, if “lucky,” procure some level of viability (read: market value) as a content-creator working in the kind of capital-ridden society that Thoreau saw as full of “a power that still cherishes and sustains a blind and unmanly love of wealth.”</p>
<h2>2</h2>
<p class="epigraph">Religion can be, and has been, the main instrument for progress.<br />
-Alfred North Whitehead</p>
<p>In the Spring of 1994, one year after my first novel’s publication, I was invited to tour parts of Germany and deliver a paper on the subject of my choice. I chose “Avant-Pop and the New Electronic Media” since I saw a connection between the Avant-Pop cultural aesthetic of “MTV, jump cuts, channel surfing, interactivity, and reality decay” (Larry McCaffery) and the evolving network culture that was quickly amassing itself in the world of online communications, particularly the Internet. Speaking at the German Association of Amerikan Studies conference in Tubingen, I said that online writing and publishing will considerably change the basic formula for getting an author’s work to a reader, that it will go from</p>
<p>Author =&gt; Agent =&gt; Editor/Publisher =&gt; Printer =&gt; Distributor =&gt; Retailer =&gt; Reader</p>
<p>to a more simplified and direct</p>
<p>Author (Sender) =&gt; Interactive Participant (Receiver).</p>
<p>It was also a good time to broach the concept of hypertext and how, as Robert Coover has pointed out, “[r]eading through a hypertext, one senses that just under the surface of the screen is a vast reservoir of story waiting to be found.” I was also hoping to introduce the German literati to what was then just a gopher (read: non-hypertextual) site I had started called Alternative-X.</p>
<p>At the time of my Spring 1994 tour, Alt-X had less than ten files, all of them in ugly ascii format (as if html were sexy!), and yet, since no one else was really talking about the Internet as a medium whose mere existence could offer a potential bonanza for independent writing and publishing, the idea of Alt-X being an online literary network that expanded the concept of writing to include electronic writing forms being distributed in a one-to-many broadcast-media, encouraged lots of notice in national newspapers and magazines. People “in the industry” were beginning to take notice. And while I was on the road, I was quick to start spreading the gospel of my new-found religion to all of my writing colleagues so that they too would consider colonizing this great untapped resource that Bill Gibson coined “cyberspace.”</p>
<p>“Send me your files,” I suggested, “it’s time to broadcast our writing via the public domain,” and soon thereafter many of them did send me an eclectic array of fiction, interviews, essays, rants, and fiction, and so an online publishing network was born. Meanwhile, as soon as I returned from Europe, I immediately checked in with my email account and found a message from a guy in Oslo, Norway, named Knut Mork. Mork, it ends up, besides being something of a Norwegian celebrity (he entered high school at 10 and the university in Oslo at 13), was impressed with my Avant-Pop manifesto and wanted to see it on the World Wide Web. This was light years before the Web became the surfing standard (six months?). Netscape wasn’t even seed-pod germinating in some entrepreneur’s fragile eggshell mind. I told him that I would be delighted to see the manifesto on the World-Wide-Web and to go ahead and mark it up (i.e. code it for hypertextual interplay). He probably regrets ever having sent me that message and agreeing to do it, because now, as Alt-X’s site manager, he helps me encode and design an average of 300k worth of new data (not including images) every month!</p>
<p>By the Fall of 1994 things were moving very fast in the global vaporware market (otherwise known as the new media industry), and this caused some real critical reflection on my part. Being digitally-networked seemed to provide more opportunities for an underground artist “to go public” than I could have ever imagined, and this unusual historical circumstance that enabled me to create an unexpected audience of considerable size (over 250,000 hits in June 1995) was like being turned on to a fascinating new drug that would provide the kind of stimulation one needs to help get through a particularly gruesome work process.</p>
<p>Of course, this sort of endless cycle of work-hype-feedback-work tends to produce an entirely new set of problems for the writer who, instantaneously performing the Body Electric as a virtual figure forever accessible in the public domain, has always already coded higher work with the same language used to transmit nanosecond flights of nomadic capital. The nonstop circulation of hype and money around certain brand-name authors becomes confused with “aesthetic value,” and a “good” work gets measured in terms of sales, TV appearances, or website “hits.” Also, the hyperrhetoric of purported “underground values” linked into some webbified version of narrative bliss as espoused by subversively-hip digerati on their ultra-happening on-line networks, becomes instantaneously embedded in the same software-syntax used to distribute electronic transactions within the digicash currency markets, all of this causing mutant forms of capital investment to occasionally make their way to the post-ARPANET artist. This happened to me when I received a phone call in the Fall of 1994 from a representative of The 300 Club, a consortium of over 180 CEOs from the top Japanese firms based in New York, inviting me to deliver a presentation on electronic publishing over the Net. The luncheon meeting at which I would present myself, they said, would take place in the second floor Gallery at the Algonquin Hotel. Now, I had always wanted to go to the Algonquin, even if my literary tastes were in direct opposition to the atmosphere it represented, and this seemed an especially sweet revenge on everything I thought I hated but was now becoming (albeit in a slightly different form) whether I wanted to or not.</p>
<h2>3</h2>
<p class="epigraph">“The Medium is the Message” is a look-around to see what’s happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.<br />
-Marshall McLuhan</p>
<p>After a typically horrendous airport delay, I landed in New York late into the evening the night before the 300 Club luncheon. Upon my arrival at the Algonquin, there was a huge shindig going on, unbelievable amounts of food and beverage being passed around, and I couldn’t wait to check in, put my bag in my room, and crash the party. “This must be the infamous literary scene I’ve heard so much about,” I convinced myself and was impatiently hitting the elevator button so that I could go back down and have direct access to Sonny Mehta and Binky Urban and all of the editors from the <span class="journaltitle">Times Book Review</span> and the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>.</p>
<p>As it ends up, the <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span> was sponsoring the party. But not for real literary purposes. No, this was a cast party for the recently finished Alan Parker film produced by Robert Altman (both present and accounted for) about the Algonquin’s old literary round-table called DOROTHY PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE. “Vicious simulation,” I thought, “and appropriately so. My generation’s experience of literary life will be packaged into a situational nostalgia portrayed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Matthew Broderick (both present and accounted for) and it will be the most uninteresting kind of literary life I can possibly imagine.”</p>
<p>The next morning, much of what I presented to the German literati in the Spring I now cut and pasted into the address I was about to deliver to the Japanese CEOs. Looking back, I now realize that the post-address questions I encountered during my 1994 speaking engagements tend to prefigure much of what’s being discussed in the mainstream media today; that is, my German audiences immediately wanted to talk about the difference between a humanistic approach to literature and a more technologically immersive approach to these age-old mediums of expression, while my Japanese CEO-captives were very curious about my predicted timeline for turning this new media thing (which they were relatively clueless about) into vast amounts of unmanly wealth. During my CEO-delivery, I noticed the audience members were feverishly taking notes throughout (“ideas are the working capital of emerging infopreneurs”). About two minutes before my designated hour was up, everyone, as if on cue or in sync with the rhythm of digicash itself, started looking at their watches. Timing is everything. Meanwhile, there were two questions at the end of my performance that had to be asked and, of course, they asked them:</p>
<p>1) How do you make money off of it?</p>
<p>To which I responded that as of yet, not too many people or businesses were making money off of it, but that that’s where it was heading</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>2) My host, the President of the 300 Club, informed me that what the first questioner wanted to know was how “YOU” make money off of it, meaning me, since my presence alone meant that I would have to be making money off of it or else why be in business, why exist?</p>
<p>Everyone laughed except for me since in my paranoid delusion I all of a sudden felt on the verge of blowing my “underground” cover, as if I could actually be “underground” in this situation. Like a born-entrepreneur always already thinking-on-his-feet, I told them that there actually were ways to make money off of it and that I could consult whoever was interested after the luncheon (and thus set up the perfect segue into what would be a three-month round of faxes and emails guaranteeing me millions of dollars of investment in Alt-X).</p>
<h2>4</h2>
<p class="epigraph">There is no universal capitalism, no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations.<br />
-Deleuze and Guattari</p>
<p>McLuhan’s “collide-oscope of interfaced situations” has become our contemporary, media-saturated life. It constantly reinvents itself for the sole purpose of keeping its own systemic reality actual. One need not even bother trying to figure it out or pretend to dream of narrative options that will turn it in against itself. If the forms of flux that interpenetrate its ever-expanding field of action need more cyborgs to tip the delicate balance in favor of a more prosaic, humane approximation of systemic survival, then believe-you-me that’s exactly what will happen (with interactive ads strung throughout, of course). It’s not purely coincidental that the upstart Internet company who provides Alt-X with its Internet server is called Cyberspace Development. President Andrew Currie originally envisioned CSD’s site as a kind of virtual real estate company. Reappropriating all notional forms of property for itself, the Internet and, more importantly, the vast realm of ether we call cyberspace, signifies the busying of a discourse losing faith in the material reality our forebears so heavily invested in. But as an underground artist participating in a low- or, at some points, no-income underground economy, I came to the Net without a penny to lose and all of my investments were in converting the currency of innovative writerly forms into more intense, experiential realities that could be distributed in ways heretofore unheard of. The key word in that last sentence, of course, is “distributed.” What’s different, what makes this new media phenomenon very exciting and worth our investigation for the time being, is how the evolving discourse networks located in cyberspace radically change the idea of distribution. Let me give you a first-hand example: those of us who put together the print-based <span class="journaltitle">Black Ice</span> literary journal can slave over its annual publication for ten to twelve months and then, because we have “good” distribution, get approximately 1000-1500 copies into the hands of dedicated readers. Production costs per unit are high because of the small number of copies we can afford to print. Whereas over our ten-year history we have cultivated a loyal community of readers, it’s very difficult for those readers (and the writers whose work they read) to interact with each other the way a community of like-minded individuals might otherwise like to. It’s a wonder that these kinds of alternative lit audiences are able to survive at all in today’s digitized pop culture.</p>
<p>But thanks to the Internet and software programs that permit us to send and receive email, fetch text and image files, create hypertext markup language, etc., Alt-X can put out the data-equivalent of an average-sized book every month and enjoy the interaction of tens of thousands of readers on a regular basis. For those who want to do more than read the material at the site (available seven days a week, 24 hours a day), there is an Alt-X mailing list that allows the community to interact with itself on whatever topics they choose (this month the discussion has concentrated on hypertext, notions of originality, Avant-Pop, and Generation-X). Something else we’re finding out is that the lag-time for contemporary writing in the US to reach sophisticated readers overseas is zilch. The Alt-X mailing list is full of writers/readers/networkers from Europe, Australia, Asia, and South America. As long as Alt-X is for free, the population of Web-surfers continues to rise, and we follow through on our mission as editors to lower our digicash expectations while creating a continuous flow of provocative content, we’ll see our audience increase even more. I’m not sure what that does to the political economy in terms of manic capital formation, but it certainly suggests that this new distribution phenomenon has the potential to cause a great deal of havoc in the Republic of Intelligentsia (wherever it may be).</p>
<p>[Amerika steers AltX through the ad-mad gluttony of the World Wide Web in <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/publicly">On Netscape, Virtual Slaves, and Making Moolah</a>, eds.]</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/mark-amerika">mark amerika</a>, <a href="/tags/kafka-chronicles">kafka chronicles</a>, <a href="/tags/heiner-muller">heiner muller</a>, <a href="/tags/thoreau">thoreau</a>, <a href="/tags/underground">underground</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-publishing">electronic publishing</a>, <a href="/tags/negroponte">negroponte</a>, <a href="/tags/capital">capital</a>, <a href="/tags/alfred-north-whitehead">Alfred North Whitehead</a>, <a href="/tags/distribut">distribut</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/alternative-x">alternative-x</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-coover">robert coover</a>, <a href="/tags/world-wide-web-0">world wide web</a>, <a href="/tags/knut-mork">knut mork</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-pop">avant-pop</a>, <a href="/tags/html">html</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/algonquin">algonquin</a>, <a href="/tags/de">de</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator904 at http://electronicbookreview.comEngineering Cyborg Ideologyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/teetering
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Katherine Hayles</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1995-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Have you seen a cyborg today? Would you know it if you had? A creature of science fiction novels, electronic engineering, and postmodern theory, the cyborg is like the white heron of Sarah Orne Jewett’s story, often discussed but seldom glimpsed. The ambiguity of what one means by a cyborg rumbles through Diane Greco’s electronic hypertext <span class="booktitle">Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric</span> as she plays a series of electronic riffs on Donna Haraway’s now famous essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” giving it, to my Los Angeles ear, an unsettling quality not unlike the queasiness I feel when I go through the mountain tunnel of the Universal Studios tour. Designed to simulate an avalanche, the tunnel rotates while the hapless passengers move straight ahead on a rail line, resulting in a sensory dissonance that makes one feel as if one were teetering on the edge of a precipice, falling and yet not falling. So it is with <span class="booktitle">Cyborg</span>, which moves with cursory speed (in the double sense of a moving cursor and of topics briefly treated) through speculations which ought to be profound but are finally simply unsettling, because they are so little grounded in the terra firma of historical specificity and technological practice.</p>
<p>Greco’s inquiry starts from the premise, articulated by Haraway, that the cyborg is a hybrid creature who has no particular reason to be faithful to the origin myths, patriarchal structures, or military funding that spawned her. Part machine, part woman (or man), part plugged-in-cybernaut, the cyborg has the power, Greco claims, to destabilize accepted boundaries and open spaces for liberatory action. “The cyborg conflates, confuses, and reassembles technology and social reality. Technology provides the tools for interactions with others, and from this interaction, cyborgs (like us) construct narrative histories of selfhood that acknowledge limits of self and other, limits thrown into relief by the very visceral awareness that this technology interpenetrates the body.” But what (or who), exactly, is a cyborg? Are we talking about people who have had literal technological interventions on their bodies, such as my friend and colleague Vivian Sobchack, who has written and lectured about herself as a cyborg, now that she has an artificial limb? If so, parts of the argument do not make sense, as when Greco claims that “unlike the essentialist critics of the past who implied that one’s biology must restrict one’s destiny, no one forces or delimits the intimate relationship between her body and her self; ‘cyborg’ is an identity she chooses on her own, with an eye towards its limits as well as its possibilities.” People who have had these kinds of interventions in their bodies generally cannot choose, or they choose only in the Hobson’s sense of having an artificial limb or no limb.</p>
<p>Perhaps then, Greco means the term to be taken metaphorically. She intends us to think not about actual cyborgs but ourselves as postmodern subjects wired into the electronic circuits that make it possible for me to write this review and you to read it. But here again, parts of the argument work only if we think of the cyborg in a more literal sense than the plugged-in subject, as when Greco wants to insist that the cyborg body is “essentialist” because it is the object of conscious technological design. “Because she has no clear boundaries, and connects with the technology to create an interface with it, the cyborg is in some sense the essentialist creature of which feminism has so long been wary. She is her body, but don’t forget - it’s an ironic body, a body that is not merely physical, but technological, and definitely more than the sum of its parts.” Such pronouncements are possible, I think, because this is theorizing in a void, theorizing that starts with the abstract idea of a Cyborg and then tries to work out its implications. Anything that the term might be taken to mean becomes what it in fact means, as if the free play of the signifier translates instantaneously and effortlessly into physical and social realities.</p>
<p>Here’s another sample. “Although encouraged by the technology to inscribe the world only in terms of an individual perspective, the cyborg situates her knowledge in order to be accountable for that part of the self that she constructs, and for how the part is reflected.” The gritty complexity that comes from engaging what one thinks something ought to mean with what it signifies to actual people enmeshed in particular circumstances is, in this study, almost completely lacking. What is being fashioned here, in short, is cyborg ideology.</p>
<p>If we read it as an ideology, it has many salient points to make. It takes as given that the postmodern body is an amalgam of biological processes and technological prostheses. It uses the technological component of the cyborg to reintroduce physicality into the body’s construction, arguing that the body must be understood technologically and biologically as well as discursively. It invokes Elaine Scarry’s analysis of pain as the place where language breaks down to underscore that the body is alarmingly vulnerable in its physicality, a vulnerability no amount of discursive analysis can erase. Following N.O. Brown, it suggests that one way humans deal with this vulnerability is through technology; “technology is the symbolic fantasy of a sublimated inability to cope with the forces in the world beyond individual control.” (Marshall McLuhan, who carried this argument further than Brown, is oddly not mentioned.) It asks whether technology combats this inability to cope or extends it, shrewdly observing that there may be hope in the fact that technology, despite being the “fantasy cathexis of the body,” is nevertheless reassuringly mundane and comprehensible. When it doesn’t work, it can be fixed. Finally, it argues that a given line of technological development is never inevitable. We choose our technologies and how to use them. All things considered, this is not the worst ideology one could espouse.</p>
<p>Although I have been summarizing the text as if it puts forth a coherent argument, in fact the writing is dispersed across multiple hypertextual links and lexias, leaving to the reader the task of figuring out how they all go together - or if they go together. In a parallel seldom made explicit but resonant throughout, Greco has made use of hypertext technology to create a cyborg text, composed of heterogeneous parts joined together by electronic circuitry, including varying font sizes, different typefaces, multiple voices, and thousands of potential narrative paths. “The point is that you are doing it yourself,” one lexia proclaims, presumably addressing the reader as well as the writer. “Creating a world of electronic impulse, blips, patterns in the ether - out of writing. It’s where the world and the word meet in the late age of print. Entangle them, however briefly, and you’ve got a hypertext designer, the hybrid of textual artist and software engineer.” Greco is currently employed as a software consultant by the start-up company Eastgate Systems, a small firm that publishes the Storyspace software that she uses to create her text as well as such hypertext titles as Cyborg. I wish that she had developed this part of her argument more fully, for it provides a potential body of practice that she might have used to ground her arguments and give them more specificity.</p>
<p>Despite its flaws, <span class="booktitle">Cyborg</span> is an interesting attempt to find a discursive style and articulate an ideology that fits electronic hypertextual writing. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay it is to acknowledge that I cannot imagine it as a print text. Its hybrid form is so completely interwoven with the electronic prostheses through which we encounter it that the cyborg body is the text, and the text is the cyborg body. Which, I take it, is precisely Greco’s point.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/brown">brown</a>, <a href="/tags/hybrid">hybrid</a>, <a href="/tags/sobchack">sobchack</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/prosthe">prosthe</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator814 at http://electronicbookreview.com